It is hard to overstate Franz Beckenbauer’s importance. Not just to Bayern Munich, not just to Germany, but to football. His passing earlier this month leaves us not just with the story of his career and life but also with the various legacies woven into it.
Born in the modest Munich district of Giesing, Beckenbauer chose to play for Bayern, following an altercation with local rivals. Having been a predominantly Jewish club, Bayern had been decimated by the Nazi regime and had failed to recover by the time Beckenbauer came onto the scene in the early 1960s. It was one of the great flukes of football history that Beckenbauer, Gerd Müller, and Sepp Maier, who could all stake a claim to be in an all-time World XI, happened to join at the same time. This would precipitate one of the greatest rises in sporting history, with Bayern catapulting from second division mediocrity to European giant status in just over ten years, winning three successive European Cups from 1974–1976.
Beckenbauer played a starring role in a West German team that surely ranks amongst the greatest international sides ever, winning the 1972 European Championship and 1974 World Cup. Beckenbauer was iconic in every World Cup he took part in, from his buccaneering displays in 1966 to his playing on with a dislocated shoulder and his arm in a sling in the ‘Game of the Century’ semi-final in 1970, right up to lifting the trophy in his home town in 1974. Finally, in 1990, he would repeat his victory as a coach.
Beckenbauer passed away in early January and has since been commemorated across the footballing world, especially in Germany and at Bayern’s home in the Allianz Arena.
“Wow: Der Kaiser track jacket. Didn’t know that there is a cult around Franz Beckenbauer” by Mark Finnern is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.