The family informs the news agency dpa on Monday that Beckenbauer is dead, aged 78. – It is with deep sadness that we announce that my husband and our father, Franz Beckenbauer, died peacefully in his sleep yesterday, Sunday, surrounded by his family, says the family. – The emperor is dead, wrote the major German newspaper Bild. – Germany says goodbye to its greatest football player, they write further. Beckenbauer is one of three who have won the World Cup both as a player and coach, and who won medals in all five World Cups and European Championships in which he participated. He also won the World Cup for his home country. He is the only defender to have won the prestigious Ballon d’Or twice – in 1972 and 1976. Beckenbauer is an icon in German and international football history. – He is the hero of our country. He has not become that by chance, he has achieved it with hard work, said his national team mate Günter Netzer. Controversy in his youth Franz Anton Beckenbauer was born in Munich in 1945, and his first club was SC München 06. But it was 1860. Munich was his favorite club as a small boy. – It was my childhood dream to play for them, he has said. He also got the chance to play for 1860 in a youth tournament when he was 14 years old. But there he got into a fight with an opponent, and the incident caused him to go to Bayern instead. He came across controversies later and. As an 18-year-old, he got his girlfriend pregnant, but did not want to marry her. It challenged the morals of the time so strongly that he was banned from the junior national team. The ban was lifted after coach Dietmar Cramer intervened and got the young and promising Beckenbauer back in, wrote Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger in the book “Tor! The Story of German Football”. He made his Bayern debut in the regional league, level 2. The debut match was a playoff match against St. Pauli. It didn’t go so well, and Bayern had to take one more season at level 2 before they moved up and established themselves in the Bundesliga. “Der Kaizer” led Bayern to the top of Europe HEIDER: Beckenbauer wearing shirt no. 5 after the “farewell game” against Real Madrid in 2010 Photo: Michaela Rehle / Reuters After that, things only went up, both for Beckenbauer and Bayern. He went by the nickname “Der Kaizer”. According to Beckenbauer himself, the name arose in connection with a friendly match in Vienna. He allowed himself to be photographed next to a bust of Emperor Franz Joseph I. The picture was printed in many newspapers, and thus the nickname was established. Beckenbauer was one of the mainstays at Bayern Munich when they assumed dominance in German football at the end of the 1960s, and reached the top of Europe in the 70s. They won the European Cup three years in a row, from 1974 to 1976. In his first season as captain, he led the team to their first league title. He would take four of them with Bayern, in addition to one with Hamburg in 1982. Medalist in five World Cup championships: Beckenbauer won a medal in five international championships. Here he celebrates when West Germany equalizes against England in the last minute of normal time in the World Cup final in 1966 Photo: AP On the national team he participated in three World Cups and two European Championships, and won medals in all of them – including victory in the European Championships in 1972 and the World Cup on home soil in 1974. He played a total of 103 international matches, with his debut against Sweden in 1965. He only scored 14 national team goals in his career, but four of them came during the World Cup in England in 1966. There they reached the final, and there he met for the first time gong Bobby Charlton. There they neutralized each other, “so thoroughly that it was a quiet fight for both of us”, Charlton once said. The rivalry with Charlton RIVAL: Franz Beckenbauer and Bobby Charlton met several times in international matches Photo: Jacques Demarthon / AFP The battle between the two was to become even clearer in the quarter-finals of the World Cup four years later. There, too, they neutralized each other for over an hour. England’s national team manager Alf Ramsey then made his well-known blunder at 2-1 to England, where Beckenbauer had just before scored the German reduction goal: He took out the slightly aging Charlton to save him for the semi-final. Beckenbauer was thus given free play, and was heavily involved in West Germany’s turnaround to a 3-2 victory. – The message Beckenbauer sent out was “Don’t try.” Coming to meet me is a waste of time,” said Charlton, perhaps the only one who could do it. The greatest triumph GOLD: Beckenbauer’s greatest triumph with the national team was the World Cup gold in 1974 Photo: Scanpix / AFP Four years later, in the World Cup final at his home ground, the Olympic Stadium in Munich, he marked Dutch superstar Johan Cruyff out of the match. It destroyed much of the Netherlands’ overall football, and Germany won 2–1. He moved to the USA in 1976 and played for the New York Cosmos for four seasons. The Cosmos won the league in three of them. He then returned to Germany and finished his career with two seasons in Hamburg, before retiring in 1982. Two years later he became national team manager, and led the team to the final in 1986 and to World Cup gold in 1990. Four times he received the award as Germany’s best player, and twice as Europe’s best. He was a midfielder in the early part of his career, but was later moved to the back, and is considered by many to be the man who created the modern libero role. There he was a free man at the back, but with his qualities he still created many attacks. Got the World Cup for Germany ORGANIZER: FIFA president Sepp Blatter and Franz Beckenbauer after West Germany has been awarded the World Cup in 2006 Photo: Lluis Gene / AFP In 1994 he became president of his old club Bayern Munich, a role he held until 2009. In In 1998 he became vice-president of the German Football Association, and was very central in the job that gave Germany the World Cup in 2006, where he was responsible for the event. He also tried his hand as a club coach, with success there as well. In 1990/91 he coached Olympique Marseille, who became French champions and reached the final of the European Cup that season. For two short periods in the 90s, he also coached Bayern Munich. But in retrospect some dark clouds gathered over Beckenbauer’s legacy. In 2014, he was suspended by FIFA’s ethics committee in connection with the corruption investigations surrounding the awarding of the World Cup to Russia (2018) and Qatar (2022). He protested, and the ban was lifted against a promise to cooperate in the investigation. In connection with the 2006 WC, he was investigated many years later for financial fraud and money laundering. But the legacy as one of the greatest ever to have played on a football pitch, no one can take away from Franz Beckenbauer.
ttn-69
– Germany says goodbye to its greatest football player – news Sport – Sports news, results and broadcasting schedule
