Franz Beckenbauer

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Franz Beckenbauer lifted the World Cup trophy as a captain in 1974, then lifted it again as a manager in 1990. Only two other men in football history, Brazil's Mario Zagallo and France's Didier Deschamps, have ever done the same. The fans and the press gave him a nickname that stuck for the rest of his life: der Kaiser, the Emperor. He played 103 times for West Germany and won the Ballon d'Or twice, the only defender ever to do so. Yet the man born in a Munich clinic in September 1945 began as a centre-forward who dreamed of playing for the wrong club. How did a working-class altar boy from the district of Giesing come to invent a position, command both the field and the dugout, and end his life under a cloud of fraud allegations? The answers run from a youth tournament in Neubiberg to a payment of millions routed through Gibraltar.

• 2. The Sweeper Reinvented

  ›

  Beckenbauer started out as a midfielder, partnered with the 1. FC Koln playmaker Wolfgang Overath in a two-man midfield for West Germany at the 1966 and 1970 World Cups. Then he moved backward on the pitch and changed what a defender could be. He is credited with inventing the modern sweeper, the libero, a defensive player who steps proactively into his team's attacks. Around the 1968-69 season, after becoming Bayern's captain, he began experimenting with the role and refining it into a new form. He did not simply defend. Beckenbauer launched attacks for both Bayern Munich and West Germany, using his passing range and technique to act as a playmaker from the back. He favoured the one-two passing combination, slipping the ball to a teammate and collecting it again past the opposing players. His leadership and fair play stood out as much as his vision, and he never received a red card during his time at Bayern. La Gazzetta dello Sport, after his death, called him the greatest defender ever.

• 3. The Emperor's Name

  ›

  In 1968, fans and the media began calling Beckenbauer der Kaiser. The popular story, which he told himself, places the origin in Vienna. During a Bayern Munich friendly there, he posed for a photo session beside a bust of the former Austrian emperor Franz Joseph the First, and the media dubbed him Fussball-Kaiser, soon shortened to der Kaiser. According to a report in the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, that explanation is untrue, however popular. The report points instead to a cup final on the 14th of June 1969. Beckenbauer fouled his opposite number, Reinhard Libuda of Schalke 04, then ignored the fans' hooting, carried the ball into the opposite part of the field, and balanced it in front of the upset crowd for half a minute. Libuda was known as Konig von Westfalen, the King of Westphalia, so the press reached for an even higher title and invented der Kaiser. The honorific later attached itself to honours that matched it; on the 1st of May 2025 the Allianz Arena's address was changed to Franz Beckenbauer Platz 5.

• 4. A Tournament Decides

  ›

  Despite his father's cynicism about the game, Beckenbauer started playing football at the age of nine, joining the youth team of SC Munich '06 in 1954. Originally a centre-forward, he idolised the 1954 World Cup winner Fritz Walter and supported 1860 Munich, then the leading club in the city even after relegation from the Oberliga Sud. "It was always my dream to play for them," he later confirmed. He never did. In 1959 he joined the Bayern Munich youth team instead, and the reason was a single Under-14 match. SC Munich '06 lacked the money to keep running its youth sides, so Beckenbauer and his teammates had agreed to join 1860 Munich as a group once their tournament in Neubiberg ended. Fate paired the two clubs in the final. A series of niggles boiled over into a physical confrontation between Beckenbauer and the opposing centre-half, and the ill-feeling pushed the boys toward Bayern rather than the team they had just come to blows with. Controversy followed him into adulthood; in 1963, aged 18, the DFB banned him from the West Germany youth team after it emerged his girlfriend was pregnant and he would not marry her, and he was readmitted only after the coach Dettmar Cramer intervened.

• 5. Three Cups To Keep

  ›

  Beckenbauer made his Bayern debut on the left wing in a Bundesliga promotion play-off against FC St. Pauli on the 6th of June 1964. Within a year the club had won the Regionalliga Sud and earned promotion to the Bundesliga. Bayern then won the German Cup in 1966-67 and the European Cup Winners' Cup in 1967, and Beckenbauer captained them to their first league title in 1968-69. The peak came in the mid-1970s. Bayern took three league championships in a row from 1972 to 1974, then a hat-trick of European Cups from 1974 to 1976. The three consecutive triumphs earned the club the right to keep the trophy permanently and made Beckenbauer the first player to win three European Cups as captain of his club. His club career then crossed the Atlantic. In 1977 he accepted a lucrative contract with the New York Cosmos in the North American Soccer League, playing alongside Pele in his debut season, and the team won the Soccer Bowl in 1977-1978 and 1980. He retired after a Bundesliga-winning spell with Hamburger SV in 1980-82 and one final season back with the Cosmos in 1983.

• 6. Wembley To The Sling

  ›

  Beckenbauer won 103 caps and scored 14 goals for West Germany, debuting in a World Cup qualifier against Sweden in Stockholm on the 26th of September 1965, a 2-1 win. He scored his first international goals against the Netherlands on the 23rd of March 1966 at De Kuip in Rotterdam, netting twice in a 4-2 victory. At the 1966 World Cup he played every match and scored four times, opening with two goals in a 5-0 win over Switzerland. In the Wembley final against hosts England, he and Bobby Charlton were ordered by their managers to man-mark each other, cancelling each other out, and England won in extra time. Beckenbauer still left as the tournament's Best Young Player and shared the Bronze Boot. Four years later came two of his most famous moments. A spectacular goal in the 69th minute against England helped West Germany recover from 2-0 down and win in extra time. Then, in the semi-final against Italy known as the Game of the Century, he dislocated his shoulder after a foul but stayed on with his arm in a sling, his side having used both their substitutions. Italy won 4-3 after extra time. West Germany took the European Championship in 1972, beating the Soviet Union 3-0 in the final.

• 7. Player And Manager

  ›

  On the 12th of September 1984, Beckenbauer replaced Jupp Derwall as manager of the West Germany national team. He took them to the 1986 World Cup final, where they lost to the Diego Maradona-inspired Argentina. The rematch came in 1990, before German reunification. Managing the last Germany side without East German players in a World Cup, Beckenbauer won the final 1-0 against Argentina, completing the rare double of lifting the trophy as captain and as manager. Club management proved rockier. He joined Marseille in 1990 but left midway through his first season, and his successor Raymond Goethals went on to win the French championship. Two brief spells in charge of Bayern Munich, in 1993-94 and again in 1996, still brought a Bundesliga title and the UEFA Cup. In 1994 he became club president, was credited with much of the club's later success, and stepped down in 2009, succeeded by Uli Honess. He had also led Germany's successful bid to host the 2006 World Cup and chaired its organizing committee. Off the field he founded the Franz-Beckenbauer-Stiftung in Hamburg on the 15th of May 1982, seeding it with the 800,000 DM gate money from his farewell match and raising more than 20 million euros in total for the disabled, the sick and people in need.

• 8. The Cloud Over The Crown

  ›

  Beginning in August 2016, Beckenbauer was investigated for fraud and money laundering tied to the 2006 World Cup. His reputation as an administrator, built over decades, turned out to rest on shifting ground. In June 2014 FIFA's Ethics Committee had banned him for 90 days for allegedly refusing to cooperate with an inquiry into the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar; he had asked for the questions in German and in writing. The ban was lifted when he agreed to take part, and in February 2016 he was fined 7,000 Swiss francs for the earlier failure to cooperate. Swiss investigators later found a payment of at least 1.7 million euro, allegedly from the South African Football Association and routed via Gibraltar. They also found that Beckenbauer, who claimed to have worked for free, had been paid 5.5 million from a 2004 sponsorship deal the German Football Association struck with the betting company Oddset. In 2019, leaked emails of the Russian parliamentarian Sergey Kapkov named Beckenbauer and his adviser Fedor Radmann as recipients of millions for votes favouring Russia's 2018 bid. None of it reached a verdict. FIFA closed its inquiry in 2021 and the criminal investigation closed in 2020, both because the statute of limitations had expired. Beckenbauer died on the 7th of January 2024 at the age of 78, and a memorial service was held at the Allianz Arena twelve days later.