A glance at the big clock at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels told the Bayern München players the time of day, a quarter past ten, but not how many minutes were left in the game, the 1974 European Cup final against Atlético de Madrid. Still, they knew the match would be over in a few seconds and the trophy was as good as lost because the Spanish side had taken a 1-0 lead in extra time against an inexplicably listless, aimless Bayern team.
A few steps into Atlético’s half, and Franz Beckenbauer received the ball. Of course he did. He was not only his club’s captain and a gifted central defender, he was also a playmaker in a very thin disguise.
The 1970s were the heyday of the classic No10, of wild mavericks who sprayed majestic long-range passes across the field. Bayern never had a player like that because they didn’t need one. Their maestro was their sweeper, or more precisely: their libero. Because Beckenbauer had done what almost nobody else had ever done – he had invented a new role on the field for himself, in the process changing his team’s entire approach to the game. Beckenbauer wasn’t content with sweeping up at the back, unlike his counterparts in Italy, where the libero position had been pioneered. Instead, he regularly dashed forward across the midfield line, superhero-like, discarding the defender’s cloak and slipping into the conductor’s tuxedo. So, of course it was Beckenbauer who received the ball to instigate Bayern’s last attack of the final and then did something very unusual – in both intent and execution – that would help turn Bayern München into a European dynasty and secure their place among the elite group of super clubs.
First, he pushed the ball sideways, not forward. He used to play up front in his youth, and those attacking instincts had never left him, which is why he would regularly scold team-mates for such lateral passes even when the clock was not ticking down relentlessly. Second, he played this pass not with the outside of the foot, his trademark and one of the reasons he was admired the world over as a player of supreme elegance and style. It was almost as if, for once, he valued precision over grace by choosing a conventional instep pass. Third, the recipient of this last pass of the game was a surprising target. Der Kaiser didn’t hand over the ball to the fleet-footed Uli Hoeness or the aggressive Paul Breitner, and he didn’t feed the lethal Gerd Müller. Instead, Beckenbauer concluded that desperate moments called for desperate measures. So, he gave the ball to stopper Hans-Georg Schwarzenbeck.
It has often been called one of the great ironies of European football that what is widely considered the most important goal in Bayern’s history was scored by the most unlikely of saviours. And yet, on another level, it made perfect sense. For all of Müller’s goalscoring records and Sepp Maier’s goalkeeping heroics, it was Beckenbauer who was most responsible for creating the modern Bayern München. And without Beckenbauer, it is very unlikely that Schwarzenbeck would have been in a team competing for the biggest prize in the European game. Granted, he was a much better footballer than he is sometimes today given credit for, but Schwarzenbeck’s most valuable skill was not his tenacity or his strength, it was his almost telepathic rapport with Der Kaiser. Beckenbauer’s constant forays up field would have been very dangerous indeed if nobody had covered for him, but Schwarzenbeck seemed to sense what the Kaiser was going to do even before it happened and would quietly, efficiently slot into the position Beckenbauer was about to vacate. Both of them were Munich boys, growing up less than two kilometres from each other, but it was far from a foregone conclusion that they would end up in the same team and rewrite the history of the European Cup.
You could actually make a case that nobody changed the course of football history more often and in more ways than Beckenbauer. The man with the imperial nickname helped establish club and country as global superpowers, invented a new role just for him and remains one of only three people to lift the World Cup both as a player and as a manager, alongside Mário Zagallo and Didier Deschamps. He became the instantly recognisable face of German football, his warm omnipotence never more absolute than at the 2006 World Cup, when a feat of planning, endurance and helicopter piloting meant only mascots Goleo and Pille attended more matches. These and other achievements on the world stage were widely discussed in the days and weeks following Beckenbauer’s death at the age of 78 in early January. For Bayern, though, you have to reach far back into his childhood for the moment that would change the club forever.
As a kid, Beckenbauer was a big 1860 München fan, idolising right-winger Ludwig Zausinger and inside-right Kurt Mondschein, both little known these days. When his own club, München 1906, announced in 1958 that they wouldn’t be able to field youth teams in the coming season for lack of funds or coaches, the 12-year-old Franz convinced his team-mates to transfer to a bigger club en bloc. Beckenbauer always said 1860 were the logical choice and his own version of what happened next is considered scripture in Germany: at Easter, Beckenbauer and his mates ran rings round 1860 in the semi-finals of an Under-14 tournament, whereupon his marker lost his composure and gave the future Kaiser a slap in the face. Hurt and enraged, Beckenbauer told the rest of his team they should not become part of such an uncivilised bunch but transfer to Bayern instead.
In the decades that followed, three men stepped forward to admit they had been the boy who inadvertently changed the history of two clubs (needless to say, each of them waited until the previous confessor had passed away). If this already sounds a bit incongruous, it was only very recently that an interesting fact came to light. One of Beckenbauer’s coaches at München 1906, and a father figure to him, had an uncle who happened to be in charge of Bayern’s schoolboy teams. So perhaps the legendary slap was actually a welcome excuse to carry out a plan that had already been hatched.
In any case, it was the right choice in more ways than one. For all his talent, Beckenbauer may have found it hard to make his mark at 1860 München, where notorious taskmaster Max Merkel was building a team that would win the league, the cup and reach the 1965 Cup Winners’ Cup final. Bayern, by comparison, were not even selected for the inaugural Bundesliga season in 1963/64, which is why a young team full of home-grown players could come into its own out of the limelight. Then there was the coach. Bayern gaffer Zlatko Čajkovski, a chubby and avuncular Yugoslav, was exactly the kind of surrogate dad these players needed, not to mention that he was smart enough to realise where Beckenbauer’s gifts were most useful.
The young Kaiser, it has to be said, was a bit of a handful in those days. He had fathered a child before he was 18 (and opted not to marry the mother, which was a shocking thing to do in deeply catholic Bavaria), and on the pitch he tended to lose patience with lesser players easily. Which is why one his youth coaches liked to play him at the back on occasion, explaining to one of Beckenbauer’s friends: “Whenever I put him up front, he just stands there and complains about the passing. I have to keep him busy. He needs some responsibility.” It may have been little more than an unusual form of occupational therapy at first, but by 1964 Čajkovski had become serious about pulling Beckenbauer further and further back. Decades would go by before the emergence of Claude Makélélé and other holding-midfielders-as-playmakers made coaches rediscover what Čajkovski must have realised the moment he saw Beckenbauer in action: if the very same guy who stops an attack can also start one, your opponents are in deep trouble.
The rest was Beckenbauer’s own idea. Back in those days of strict man-marking, he took a long, hard look at the Italian game and noticed that sweepers were never marked because they always stayed put. Then he realised that arguably the most dangerous player on the great Inter team that dominated the European Cup was full-back Giacinto Facchetti, who scored almost 60 league goals during a club career that fell into the era of Catenaccio. As Beckenbauer would later explain, “Facchetti, as a left-back, could only move forward or to his right. But since I was playing in a central role, I could also move to my left. I was free to roam.” Put differently, he moved further back so that he could move even further forward.
However, inventing a new position for himself, which meant certain types of players had to be added to the team, wasn’t the only way in which Beckenbauer shaped the club. When Čajkovski’s successor Branko Zebec informed the board in November 1969 that he would not extend his contract, the club’s technical director Robert Schwan was told to find a new coach. Since Schwan also happened to be Beckenbauer’s personal agent, he asked him for advice, whereupon Der Kaiser recommended a man called Udo Lattek. It was an outlandish idea. Lattek was not yet 35 and was in charge of West Germany’s Under-19s. He had never played professionally and had never coached a top senior side before. He would become the first coach to win all three UEFA club competitions (with Bayern, Barcelona and Mönchengladbach), but to suggest anything like this in 1969 would have invited howls of derision.
Beckenbauer’s inspired choice of coach would lead directly to the final pieces of the Bayern puzzle, because Lattek immediately asked two of his most talented youngsters to reject the multiple offers they were receiving and instead join him in Munich – Hoeness and Breitner. Less than four years later, all three were fighting for the European Cup. It is not known what Lattek did when he watched Beckenbauer give the ball to Schwarzenbeck from the bench, but we can assume that Hoeness and Breitner were as aghast as Müller, who saw Schwarzenbeck pick up pace, knew what was coming and yelled, “No, don’t shoot!” But it was too late. Schwarzenbeck struck from 30 metres out. Then he heard an almighty roar and saw Beckenbauer running towards him with open arms.
Two days later, Bayern won the replay in great style, Müller scoring two of the finest European Cup final goals and Hoeness adding a double of his own. Bayern would remain unbeaten in 16 consecutive ties in the continent’s premier competition and win the trophy two more times before finally being knocked out by Dynamo Kyiv in the quarter-finals almost three years later, a pair of late goals sealing their fate. It was the end of an era, not least because, barely a month after the Kyiv defeat, Beckenbauer announced he was leaving club and country to join New York Cosmos.
It was not the end of the Bayern dynasty, however. That had well and truly been established on that famous night in Brussels. Over the coming decades, the German side would be a constant presence on the biggest European stage. True, it would take them a while to win the iconic trophy again, and there are those who say it might not have happened if Beckenbauer hadn’t become Bayern’s president in 1994. But that, as they say, is another story.
A glance at the big clock at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels told the Bayern München players the time of day, a quarter past ten, but not how many minutes were left in the game, the 1974 European Cup final against Atlético de Madrid. Still, they knew the match would be over in a few seconds and the trophy was as good as lost because the Spanish side had taken a 1-0 lead in extra time against an inexplicably listless, aimless Bayern team.
A few steps into Atlético’s half, and Franz Beckenbauer received the ball. Of course he did. He was not only his club’s captain and a gifted central defender, he was also a playmaker in a very thin disguise.
The 1970s were the heyday of the classic No10, of wild mavericks who sprayed majestic long-range passes across the field. Bayern never had a player like that because they didn’t need one. Their maestro was their sweeper, or more precisely: their libero. Because Beckenbauer had done what almost nobody else had ever done – he had invented a new role on the field for himself, in the process changing his team’s entire approach to the game. Beckenbauer wasn’t content with sweeping up at the back, unlike his counterparts in Italy, where the libero position had been pioneered. Instead, he regularly dashed forward across the midfield line, superhero-like, discarding the defender’s cloak and slipping into the conductor’s tuxedo. So, of course it was Beckenbauer who received the ball to instigate Bayern’s last attack of the final and then did something very unusual – in both intent and execution – that would help turn Bayern München into a European dynasty and secure their place among the elite group of super clubs.
First, he pushed the ball sideways, not forward. He used to play up front in his youth, and those attacking instincts had never left him, which is why he would regularly scold team-mates for such lateral passes even when the clock was not ticking down relentlessly. Second, he played this pass not with the outside of the foot, his trademark and one of the reasons he was admired the world over as a player of supreme elegance and style. It was almost as if, for once, he valued precision over grace by choosing a conventional instep pass. Third, the recipient of this last pass of the game was a surprising target. Der Kaiser didn’t hand over the ball to the fleet-footed Uli Hoeness or the aggressive Paul Breitner, and he didn’t feed the lethal Gerd Müller. Instead, Beckenbauer concluded that desperate moments called for desperate measures. So, he gave the ball to stopper Hans-Georg Schwarzenbeck.
It has often been called one of the great ironies of European football that what is widely considered the most important goal in Bayern’s history was scored by the most unlikely of saviours. And yet, on another level, it made perfect sense. For all of Müller’s goalscoring records and Sepp Maier’s goalkeeping heroics, it was Beckenbauer who was most responsible for creating the modern Bayern München. And without Beckenbauer, it is very unlikely that Schwarzenbeck would have been in a team competing for the biggest prize in the European game. Granted, he was a much better footballer than he is sometimes today given credit for, but Schwarzenbeck’s most valuable skill was not his tenacity or his strength, it was his almost telepathic rapport with Der Kaiser. Beckenbauer’s constant forays up field would have been very dangerous indeed if nobody had covered for him, but Schwarzenbeck seemed to sense what the Kaiser was going to do even before it happened and would quietly, efficiently slot into the position Beckenbauer was about to vacate. Both of them were Munich boys, growing up less than two kilometres from each other, but it was far from a foregone conclusion that they would end up in the same team and rewrite the history of the European Cup.
You could actually make a case that nobody changed the course of football history more often and in more ways than Beckenbauer. The man with the imperial nickname helped establish club and country as global superpowers, invented a new role just for him and remains one of only three people to lift the World Cup both as a player and as a manager, alongside Mário Zagallo and Didier Deschamps. He became the instantly recognisable face of German football, his warm omnipotence never more absolute than at the 2006 World Cup, when a feat of planning, endurance and helicopter piloting meant only mascots Goleo and Pille attended more matches. These and other achievements on the world stage were widely discussed in the days and weeks following Beckenbauer’s death at the age of 78 in early January. For Bayern, though, you have to reach far back into his childhood for the moment that would change the club forever.
As a kid, Beckenbauer was a big 1860 München fan, idolising right-winger Ludwig Zausinger and inside-right Kurt Mondschein, both little known these days. When his own club, München 1906, announced in 1958 that they wouldn’t be able to field youth teams in the coming season for lack of funds or coaches, the 12-year-old Franz convinced his team-mates to transfer to a bigger club en bloc. Beckenbauer always said 1860 were the logical choice and his own version of what happened next is considered scripture in Germany: at Easter, Beckenbauer and his mates ran rings round 1860 in the semi-finals of an Under-14 tournament, whereupon his marker lost his composure and gave the future Kaiser a slap in the face. Hurt and enraged, Beckenbauer told the rest of his team they should not become part of such an uncivilised bunch but transfer to Bayern instead.
In the decades that followed, three men stepped forward to admit they had been the boy who inadvertently changed the history of two clubs (needless to say, each of them waited until the previous confessor had passed away). If this already sounds a bit incongruous, it was only very recently that an interesting fact came to light. One of Beckenbauer’s coaches at München 1906, and a father figure to him, had an uncle who happened to be in charge of Bayern’s schoolboy teams. So perhaps the legendary slap was actually a welcome excuse to carry out a plan that had already been hatched.
In any case, it was the right choice in more ways than one. For all his talent, Beckenbauer may have found it hard to make his mark at 1860 München, where notorious taskmaster Max Merkel was building a team that would win the league, the cup and reach the 1965 Cup Winners’ Cup final. Bayern, by comparison, were not even selected for the inaugural Bundesliga season in 1963/64, which is why a young team full of home-grown players could come into its own out of the limelight. Then there was the coach. Bayern gaffer Zlatko Čajkovski, a chubby and avuncular Yugoslav, was exactly the kind of surrogate dad these players needed, not to mention that he was smart enough to realise where Beckenbauer’s gifts were most useful.
The young Kaiser, it has to be said, was a bit of a handful in those days. He had fathered a child before he was 18 (and opted not to marry the mother, which was a shocking thing to do in deeply catholic Bavaria), and on the pitch he tended to lose patience with lesser players easily. Which is why one his youth coaches liked to play him at the back on occasion, explaining to one of Beckenbauer’s friends: “Whenever I put him up front, he just stands there and complains about the passing. I have to keep him busy. He needs some responsibility.” It may have been little more than an unusual form of occupational therapy at first, but by 1964 Čajkovski had become serious about pulling Beckenbauer further and further back. Decades would go by before the emergence of Claude Makélélé and other holding-midfielders-as-playmakers made coaches rediscover what Čajkovski must have realised the moment he saw Beckenbauer in action: if the very same guy who stops an attack can also start one, your opponents are in deep trouble.
The rest was Beckenbauer’s own idea. Back in those days of strict man-marking, he took a long, hard look at the Italian game and noticed that sweepers were never marked because they always stayed put. Then he realised that arguably the most dangerous player on the great Inter team that dominated the European Cup was full-back Giacinto Facchetti, who scored almost 60 league goals during a club career that fell into the era of Catenaccio. As Beckenbauer would later explain, “Facchetti, as a left-back, could only move forward or to his right. But since I was playing in a central role, I could also move to my left. I was free to roam.” Put differently, he moved further back so that he could move even further forward.
However, inventing a new position for himself, which meant certain types of players had to be added to the team, wasn’t the only way in which Beckenbauer shaped the club. When Čajkovski’s successor Branko Zebec informed the board in November 1969 that he would not extend his contract, the club’s technical director Robert Schwan was told to find a new coach. Since Schwan also happened to be Beckenbauer’s personal agent, he asked him for advice, whereupon Der Kaiser recommended a man called Udo Lattek. It was an outlandish idea. Lattek was not yet 35 and was in charge of West Germany’s Under-19s. He had never played professionally and had never coached a top senior side before. He would become the first coach to win all three UEFA club competitions (with Bayern, Barcelona and Mönchengladbach), but to suggest anything like this in 1969 would have invited howls of derision.
Beckenbauer’s inspired choice of coach would lead directly to the final pieces of the Bayern puzzle, because Lattek immediately asked two of his most talented youngsters to reject the multiple offers they were receiving and instead join him in Munich – Hoeness and Breitner. Less than four years later, all three were fighting for the European Cup. It is not known what Lattek did when he watched Beckenbauer give the ball to Schwarzenbeck from the bench, but we can assume that Hoeness and Breitner were as aghast as Müller, who saw Schwarzenbeck pick up pace, knew what was coming and yelled, “No, don’t shoot!” But it was too late. Schwarzenbeck struck from 30 metres out. Then he heard an almighty roar and saw Beckenbauer running towards him with open arms.
Two days later, Bayern won the replay in great style, Müller scoring two of the finest European Cup final goals and Hoeness adding a double of his own. Bayern would remain unbeaten in 16 consecutive ties in the continent’s premier competition and win the trophy two more times before finally being knocked out by Dynamo Kyiv in the quarter-finals almost three years later, a pair of late goals sealing their fate. It was the end of an era, not least because, barely a month after the Kyiv defeat, Beckenbauer announced he was leaving club and country to join New York Cosmos.
It was not the end of the Bayern dynasty, however. That had well and truly been established on that famous night in Brussels. Over the coming decades, the German side would be a constant presence on the biggest European stage. True, it would take them a while to win the iconic trophy again, and there are those who say it might not have happened if Beckenbauer hadn’t become Bayern’s president in 1994. But that, as they say, is another story.
A glance at the big clock at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels told the Bayern München players the time of day, a quarter past ten, but not how many minutes were left in the game, the 1974 European Cup final against Atlético de Madrid. Still, they knew the match would be over in a few seconds and the trophy was as good as lost because the Spanish side had taken a 1-0 lead in extra time against an inexplicably listless, aimless Bayern team.
A few steps into Atlético’s half, and Franz Beckenbauer received the ball. Of course he did. He was not only his club’s captain and a gifted central defender, he was also a playmaker in a very thin disguise.
The 1970s were the heyday of the classic No10, of wild mavericks who sprayed majestic long-range passes across the field. Bayern never had a player like that because they didn’t need one. Their maestro was their sweeper, or more precisely: their libero. Because Beckenbauer had done what almost nobody else had ever done – he had invented a new role on the field for himself, in the process changing his team’s entire approach to the game. Beckenbauer wasn’t content with sweeping up at the back, unlike his counterparts in Italy, where the libero position had been pioneered. Instead, he regularly dashed forward across the midfield line, superhero-like, discarding the defender’s cloak and slipping into the conductor’s tuxedo. So, of course it was Beckenbauer who received the ball to instigate Bayern’s last attack of the final and then did something very unusual – in both intent and execution – that would help turn Bayern München into a European dynasty and secure their place among the elite group of super clubs.
First, he pushed the ball sideways, not forward. He used to play up front in his youth, and those attacking instincts had never left him, which is why he would regularly scold team-mates for such lateral passes even when the clock was not ticking down relentlessly. Second, he played this pass not with the outside of the foot, his trademark and one of the reasons he was admired the world over as a player of supreme elegance and style. It was almost as if, for once, he valued precision over grace by choosing a conventional instep pass. Third, the recipient of this last pass of the game was a surprising target. Der Kaiser didn’t hand over the ball to the fleet-footed Uli Hoeness or the aggressive Paul Breitner, and he didn’t feed the lethal Gerd Müller. Instead, Beckenbauer concluded that desperate moments called for desperate measures. So, he gave the ball to stopper Hans-Georg Schwarzenbeck.
It has often been called one of the great ironies of European football that what is widely considered the most important goal in Bayern’s history was scored by the most unlikely of saviours. And yet, on another level, it made perfect sense. For all of Müller’s goalscoring records and Sepp Maier’s goalkeeping heroics, it was Beckenbauer who was most responsible for creating the modern Bayern München. And without Beckenbauer, it is very unlikely that Schwarzenbeck would have been in a team competing for the biggest prize in the European game. Granted, he was a much better footballer than he is sometimes today given credit for, but Schwarzenbeck’s most valuable skill was not his tenacity or his strength, it was his almost telepathic rapport with Der Kaiser. Beckenbauer’s constant forays up field would have been very dangerous indeed if nobody had covered for him, but Schwarzenbeck seemed to sense what the Kaiser was going to do even before it happened and would quietly, efficiently slot into the position Beckenbauer was about to vacate. Both of them were Munich boys, growing up less than two kilometres from each other, but it was far from a foregone conclusion that they would end up in the same team and rewrite the history of the European Cup.
You could actually make a case that nobody changed the course of football history more often and in more ways than Beckenbauer. The man with the imperial nickname helped establish club and country as global superpowers, invented a new role just for him and remains one of only three people to lift the World Cup both as a player and as a manager, alongside Mário Zagallo and Didier Deschamps. He became the instantly recognisable face of German football, his warm omnipotence never more absolute than at the 2006 World Cup, when a feat of planning, endurance and helicopter piloting meant only mascots Goleo and Pille attended more matches. These and other achievements on the world stage were widely discussed in the days and weeks following Beckenbauer’s death at the age of 78 in early January. For Bayern, though, you have to reach far back into his childhood for the moment that would change the club forever.
As a kid, Beckenbauer was a big 1860 München fan, idolising right-winger Ludwig Zausinger and inside-right Kurt Mondschein, both little known these days. When his own club, München 1906, announced in 1958 that they wouldn’t be able to field youth teams in the coming season for lack of funds or coaches, the 12-year-old Franz convinced his team-mates to transfer to a bigger club en bloc. Beckenbauer always said 1860 were the logical choice and his own version of what happened next is considered scripture in Germany: at Easter, Beckenbauer and his mates ran rings round 1860 in the semi-finals of an Under-14 tournament, whereupon his marker lost his composure and gave the future Kaiser a slap in the face. Hurt and enraged, Beckenbauer told the rest of his team they should not become part of such an uncivilised bunch but transfer to Bayern instead.
In the decades that followed, three men stepped forward to admit they had been the boy who inadvertently changed the history of two clubs (needless to say, each of them waited until the previous confessor had passed away). If this already sounds a bit incongruous, it was only very recently that an interesting fact came to light. One of Beckenbauer’s coaches at München 1906, and a father figure to him, had an uncle who happened to be in charge of Bayern’s schoolboy teams. So perhaps the legendary slap was actually a welcome excuse to carry out a plan that had already been hatched.
In any case, it was the right choice in more ways than one. For all his talent, Beckenbauer may have found it hard to make his mark at 1860 München, where notorious taskmaster Max Merkel was building a team that would win the league, the cup and reach the 1965 Cup Winners’ Cup final. Bayern, by comparison, were not even selected for the inaugural Bundesliga season in 1963/64, which is why a young team full of home-grown players could come into its own out of the limelight. Then there was the coach. Bayern gaffer Zlatko Čajkovski, a chubby and avuncular Yugoslav, was exactly the kind of surrogate dad these players needed, not to mention that he was smart enough to realise where Beckenbauer’s gifts were most useful.
The young Kaiser, it has to be said, was a bit of a handful in those days. He had fathered a child before he was 18 (and opted not to marry the mother, which was a shocking thing to do in deeply catholic Bavaria), and on the pitch he tended to lose patience with lesser players easily. Which is why one his youth coaches liked to play him at the back on occasion, explaining to one of Beckenbauer’s friends: “Whenever I put him up front, he just stands there and complains about the passing. I have to keep him busy. He needs some responsibility.” It may have been little more than an unusual form of occupational therapy at first, but by 1964 Čajkovski had become serious about pulling Beckenbauer further and further back. Decades would go by before the emergence of Claude Makélélé and other holding-midfielders-as-playmakers made coaches rediscover what Čajkovski must have realised the moment he saw Beckenbauer in action: if the very same guy who stops an attack can also start one, your opponents are in deep trouble.
The rest was Beckenbauer’s own idea. Back in those days of strict man-marking, he took a long, hard look at the Italian game and noticed that sweepers were never marked because they always stayed put. Then he realised that arguably the most dangerous player on the great Inter team that dominated the European Cup was full-back Giacinto Facchetti, who scored almost 60 league goals during a club career that fell into the era of Catenaccio. As Beckenbauer would later explain, “Facchetti, as a left-back, could only move forward or to his right. But since I was playing in a central role, I could also move to my left. I was free to roam.” Put differently, he moved further back so that he could move even further forward.
However, inventing a new position for himself, which meant certain types of players had to be added to the team, wasn’t the only way in which Beckenbauer shaped the club. When Čajkovski’s successor Branko Zebec informed the board in November 1969 that he would not extend his contract, the club’s technical director Robert Schwan was told to find a new coach. Since Schwan also happened to be Beckenbauer’s personal agent, he asked him for advice, whereupon Der Kaiser recommended a man called Udo Lattek. It was an outlandish idea. Lattek was not yet 35 and was in charge of West Germany’s Under-19s. He had never played professionally and had never coached a top senior side before. He would become the first coach to win all three UEFA club competitions (with Bayern, Barcelona and Mönchengladbach), but to suggest anything like this in 1969 would have invited howls of derision.
Beckenbauer’s inspired choice of coach would lead directly to the final pieces of the Bayern puzzle, because Lattek immediately asked two of his most talented youngsters to reject the multiple offers they were receiving and instead join him in Munich – Hoeness and Breitner. Less than four years later, all three were fighting for the European Cup. It is not known what Lattek did when he watched Beckenbauer give the ball to Schwarzenbeck from the bench, but we can assume that Hoeness and Breitner were as aghast as Müller, who saw Schwarzenbeck pick up pace, knew what was coming and yelled, “No, don’t shoot!” But it was too late. Schwarzenbeck struck from 30 metres out. Then he heard an almighty roar and saw Beckenbauer running towards him with open arms.
Two days later, Bayern won the replay in great style, Müller scoring two of the finest European Cup final goals and Hoeness adding a double of his own. Bayern would remain unbeaten in 16 consecutive ties in the continent’s premier competition and win the trophy two more times before finally being knocked out by Dynamo Kyiv in the quarter-finals almost three years later, a pair of late goals sealing their fate. It was the end of an era, not least because, barely a month after the Kyiv defeat, Beckenbauer announced he was leaving club and country to join New York Cosmos.
It was not the end of the Bayern dynasty, however. That had well and truly been established on that famous night in Brussels. Over the coming decades, the German side would be a constant presence on the biggest European stage. True, it would take them a while to win the iconic trophy again, and there are those who say it might not have happened if Beckenbauer hadn’t become Bayern’s president in 1994. But that, as they say, is another story.
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