The fame and stature of Franz Beckenbauer through his artistry on the football field attained a scale of global recognition matched perhaps only by his two greatest contemporaries, Pelé and Johan Cruyff. His and their journeys as players were elevated into the expansion of the game itself: from a passionately loved sport to an industry; from star footballers to superstar celebrities, from black and white to colour. Beckenbauer’s rise to become the player of such poised control, who entranced me as a nine-year-old boy watching on television his 1974 World Cup triumph, was woven also into the reinvention of his country itself. He was born in 1945, in a ruined and disgraced Munich right after the war; he became a free-flowing star as West Germany found rebuilt confidence in the 1960s, he won the World Cup in 1974 for a modern, capable nation, and won it again as a coach for a reunified Germany in 1990. Then he headed, fronted and chaired the bid and organising committee to bring the World Cup to a happier, more at ease country for that Sommermärchen of 2006. Beckenbauer said he had done it for no payment, just for the fulfilment and duty of bringing the World Cup to his mother country, for all that would mean. His status in Germany was beyond der Kaiser; he was adored.
In Fifa’s own profile of an imperious great who embodied that 1974 period of transformation, another star of his day, his national team colleague Günter Netzer, is quoted saying: ‘He’s the hero of our nation. It hasn’t happened by chance, he’s earned it by hard work.’
Michel Platini is quoted, too, with an archetypal quip: ‘A truly impressive person. If you don’t like him, there’s something wrong with you.’
More recently, his advisers and commercial agents, for the Beckenbauer name and ‘brand’ which still sold so well as an association with class, quality and integrity, even conceived of a conference built around him, to consider how to improve the governance of football. ‘Camp Beckenbauer’, held in the smart ski resort of Kitzbühel in the Austrian Alps, was a beautifully organised, rarefied gathering, aspiring to be a football and sport equivalent of the World Economic Forum which made another Alpine destination famous, Davos. One among the platform of sponsors lending their name to the event was Adidas, which has a lifetime licensing agreement with Beckenbauer, having from the 1960s striped their brand into his. In 2015, Camp Beckenbauer kindly invited me, to talk about Fifa’s crisis, on a panel with Jérôme Champagne, who was at the time campaigning to be Blatter’s replacement as president. Champagne talked insightfully about the detailed changes he thought should be made to Fifa’s structures; I took a step back and said Fifa, after the indictments and so much corruption exposed, had become toxic, and was still in denial about the scale of its disgrace. I remember the great Franz Beckenbauer, a hero of my boyhood, sitting in the front row of the handsome hall, his hair silver, his glasses on trend, listening indulgently.
There were, it has to be said, stories always around that der Kaiser in his grown-up life was not as flawless as the figure we idolised on telly. Very early in my own involvement as a journalist with issues relating to Fifa, I was told that Beckenbauer long-term had quite prolific commercial activities, assisted by one of his advisers, Fedor Radmann.
The world had been quite startled in June 2014 when Beckenbauer was banned from football for ninety days by the Fifa ethics committee for failing to cooperate with Michael Garcia’s investigation into the bidding for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups despite, the statement said, he had been contacted in English and German. Beckenbauer had responded to that suspension by saying he had not understood the requests and was in fact willing to cooperate.
Yet when I bumped into Beckenbauer for a couple of minutes during his tour of charming and welcoming delegates to the camp, I came over just a little starstruck, feeling a wave of nostalgia for what he represented to me: a love of football, ever since it blessed my happy childhood. So I just asked him like a fan, about the World Cup in 1966, Bobby Moore and Bobby Charlton, Mexico in 1970; I must have bored him with my sentimental fixation with his 1974 zenith, and told him it was the first World Cup I ever watched. He smiled and indulged me and talked as he must have done a million times to dazzled punters, about how much he had enjoyed it all–in fact, he said how much he had relished life in New York in the mid-1970s, where he was pictured at the Studio 54 disco and could loosen up into something of a playboy.
On 16 October 2015, just nine days after Camp Beckenbauer had happily concluded in the clean, wholesome, Alpine air of Kitzbühel, Der Spiegel explosively picked at the lustre of the Beckenbauer legend again. The magazine exposed what it described as a ‘slush fund’ of 10m CHF, €6.7m, that it alleged had been used to buy Fifa executive committee votes for the 2006 World Cup. Beckenbauer, who had been the president of the World Cup bid, Radmann, who was his vice president, and other senior DFB officials named as having known about it, angrily denied the allegations. Beckenbauer, speaking immediately after Der Spiegel published, said:
‘I never provided anyone with money in order to secure votes for our World Cup bid, and neither did anyone else on the organising committee, as far as I know.’
The DFB president, Wolfgang Niersbach, also denied it, saying: ‘The World Cup was not bought.’ He said that ‘to clear it up’, there was an internal investigation ongoing, and an external investigation to be undertaken by the international law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.
While Freshfields was still conducting its investigation, on 17 February 2016, Fifa’s ethics committee fined Beckenbauer 7,000 CHF and gave him a warning. This sanction came as a result of its further investigations following the summary by Judge Hans-Joachim Eckert of Garcia’s report into the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. The ethics committee stated again that although he had subsequently changed his attitude, Beckenbauer had failed to cooperate with the investigation, ‘despite repeated requests for his assistance. This included requests to provide information during an in-person interview and in response to written questions presented in both English and German.’
There was no explanation of what precisely Garcia had been so keen to talk to him about. He was assumed by then to have voted for Australia to host the tournament in 2022–in fact that he was Australia’s single vote. It was known that Radmann, his long-term associate and adviser, had worked for the Australia bid, described as a consultant. Another consultant was Andreas Abold, a graphic designer in Munich, who was taken on by the Australia bid to produce its bid book, the official brochure which was sent to Fifa setting out a bid’s credentials, the promotional videos and other work for Fifa’s ‘technical inspection’ visit to the country and its facilities, and the final presentation made to the executive committee on 2 December 2010 in Zurich. That included a film, widely derided, featuring a cartoon kangaroo, which clearly did not do much to bounce anyone into voting for Australia. The Australia bid also hired Peter Hargitay, the former media adviser to Sepp Blatter at Fifa and Mohamed bin Hammam, who had worked for the England 2018 World Cup bid before his contract was not renewed following Lord Triesman’s arrival as the chairman.
The employment of Radmann, Abold and Hargitay as consultants to the Australia 2022 World Cup bid had become controversial, particularly after their undoubtedly Fifa directory-like contacts book and long experience in the affairs of the organisation yielded just one vote. The Australian FA (FFA) had convinced the Australian government to spend Aus$45.6m on the bid to persuade Fifa’s executive committee to vote the World Cup to Australia. When the FFA produced its final report to the government in September 2011, it showed that an extraordinary amount of that money had been paid to the consultants, particularly Radmann and Abold.
Radmann’s employment as a consultant had not been announced; Bonita Mersiades, who had been head of corporate and public affairs for the bid until she was fired in January 2010 for reasons which were not explained, said she was told not to publicly announce Radmann’s appointment, or that of Hargitay. In the final report, the FFA stated that Radmann was not employed directly, but ‘sub-contracted’ by Abold ‘to deliver advocacy services’. The report states that:
‘Mr Radmann’s role, in collaboration with [Hargitay’s company] ECN, was to provide advice on the bid’s strategic campaign to the FFA chairman [Frank Lowy] and CEO [Ben Buckley] and to advocate in support of FFA’s bid. This included engaging with key decision-makers and facilitating introductions and access to members of the Fifa executive committee for FFA.’
The consultants were, then, substantially to use their close familiarity with the Fifa executive committee members to lobby them to vote for the bid employing them, Australia. The report added:
‘Mr Radmann had provided similar services in support of South Africa’s bid to host the 2010 Fifa World Cup and Germany’s bid to host the 2006 Fifa World Cup.’
Abold, too, had worked on those bids; his consultancy in Munich produced the bid book for South Africa’s 2010 World Cup pitch, and Germany’s bid for 2006. They were a winning team at Fifa. For those two World Cup hosting votes, Beckenbauer had not been a member of the Fifa executive committee. He was elected on to it in 2007, and so in 2010, when the vote was held for the hosts to the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, Beckenbauer was a voting member of the executive committee for the first time, with his close associate, Fedor Radmann, and Andreas Abold with whom he had worked on the German 2006 bid, working for Australia 2022.
After Germany had won its bid for 2006, and Radmann had become Beckenbauer’s vice president on the organising committee for the tournament itself, Abold had been hired, too; he designed the World Cup logo, with its three happy, smiley faces gleeful above the famous trophy. German press criticism of an alleged conflict of interest, because Radmann and Abold were so close they had a business relationship outside of the World Cup work, led to Radmann stepping down on 30 June 2003 and becoming a consultant to the organising committee instead. Theo Zwanziger, later the DFB president, took over Radmann’s formal position.
The final report for Australia’s 2022 bid submitted by the FFA showed that the work for which Abold was responsible had cost around Aus$10m of the government’s public money: $4.89m for the bid book, $3.82m for the final presentation, and $1.36m for work done on the Fifa inspection visit. Fedor Radmann, noted in brackets as a sub-contractor to Abold, was paid Aus$3.63m. Hargitay’s bill was less than half that, Aus$1.45m, which he says included not only his work, but four members of staff at ECN. For all that expertise and experience, and contacts in the House of Fifa corridors, and Aus$15m paid for the work of these three people, Australia, with all its attractions as a country, had garnered one vote.
Hans-Joachim Eckert’s summary of the Michael Garcia ethics committee report into the 2018 and 2022 bidding process, which is heavily anonymised, presumably to protect Fifa against legal action, said this about the Australia bid:
‘[Garcia’s] report concludes that the Australia 2022 bid team did undertake specific efforts to gain the support of a particular then Fifa executive committee member and it suggests that there have been efforts to conceal certain key relationships in this context. Certain devices employed by the bid team and its consultants were seemingly aimed at hiding ties with individuals close to the executive committee member concerned while taking advantage of their influence over the member to further the bid strategy.’
It has never been clarified publicly to whom this refers, and whether the executive committee member, whose ties to individuals close to him were attempted to be hidden, was Beckenbauer. Or whether this is what Garcia had wanted to talk to Beckenbauer about. What is now known is that Mersiades, who became a public critic of the Australia bid in central respects, including the employment of the consultants, did express her concerns to Garcia. She was concerned about the closeness of Radmann and Abold, who were paid so much by Australia to drum up support at Fifa, with Beckenbauer himself, a voter on Fifa’s executive committee. She is also a critic of the money paid, arguing that, in particular, $10m to Abold for the bid book was hugely more than a normal design-and-consulting company would have charged for work of a similar–or in the case of the final presentation film, better–standard, and it was not clear to her what Radmann did for his $3.63m.
In fact, Mersiades alleges that Abold directly claimed his connection to Beckenbauer as an advantage of hiring him. She says Abold stated that if the Australia bid employed him as a consultant and designer of the bid book, it would bring with it Beckenbauer’s vote.
‘When Andreas Abold visited us in June 2008,’ Mersiades told me, ‘he explicitly told us that Franz Beckenbauer was part of the “package” he could offer.’
Mersiades says that afterwards, within the Australia bid, ‘it was acknowledged internally as one of the major features of his pitch. Beckenbauer, Radmann and Abold were a package deal. We engaged Abold, and then Radmann through Abold, and that got us–at least in theory–Beckenbauer’s support.’
Mersiades’ evidence was quite sniffily dismissed by Eckert, under the heading ‘Role and relevance of a “Whistleblower”’, which was clearly a reference to her. He said that while she provided some useful information, ‘the evidence often did not support [her] specific recollections and allegations’.
However, what Mersiades says about the Abold, Radmann, Beckenbauer connections tallies with what I was told from within the England 2018 bid. One senior member of the bid, who wanted to remain anonymous, told me that Peter Hargitay, while working for the England bid as a consultant, had suggested the employment of Abold as a way of winning Beckenbauer’s vote.
‘He said that if you employ Andreas Abold to write the bid book–and he did say he was the best because he had worked on the South Africa 2010 and Germany 2006 bids–and pay Abold the fees you are asked for, that will be very well received by Franz Beckenbauer.’
He said that the England 2018 bid was not at all interested in working in that way, and they dismissed the suggestion.
Peter Hargitay, whom I have known for years now, as he has liaised with the press on behalf of Blatter, bin Hammam and in other capacities, adamantly denies having said that. He told me that in itself it is not too surprising to say a bid might be seen favourably ‘if you have somebody with connections to somebody else’. However he denies making any recommendation to the England bid to employ Abold and says he did not even know Abold at that time, only coming to know him when they worked together on the Australia bid.
When I asked the FFA about its employment of the consultants with close ties to Franz Beckenbauer, a spokesman declined to comment, suggesting I look at statements already made in the press. On 3 June 2015, after the arrests and indictments in Zurich and Sepp Blatter’s resignation, Frank Lowy issued an open letter which addressed some of the concerns.
He stated that he ‘nursed a bitter grievance’ after Australia received just one vote, but said: ‘We ran a clean bid.’
About the consultants, he said he recruited them ‘on the advice of Fifa’s leadership’, because Australia were not ‘familiar with the powerbrokers in world football’. All he said about them was that they ‘ultimately proved less than effective, to say the least’.
Radmann, Abold and Franz Beckenbauer–via his representatives at Camp Beckenbauer–did not respond at all to detailed questions about the Australia 2022 World Cup bid, and their relationships. I put to them that the employment of Abold and Radmann as consultants for a World Cup bid on which Beckenbauer was going to be voting looked at least like he had a conflict of interest, and at worst, given the huge fees paid to Abold and Radmann, could look like an improper commercial relationship. They did not reply to explain.
By the time I asked them, Beckenbauer and Radmann had many other issues to worry about. The Freshfields inquiry, which Niersbach had said would dismiss the story, produced its report on 4 March 2016. It did not dismiss the story at all. In fact, it upheld it in forensic and devastating detail, and it would lead to a great deal of trouble for Franz Beckenbauer. The report said it had not found evidence that votes for the 2006 World Cup were bought, but on the evidence it did find: ‘Equally, however, we cannot rule it out.’
It found, in essence, that Der Spiegel had been right: the DFB had indeed spent 10m CHF (€6.7m) in 2005, one year before the World Cup was held. It was used, via Fifa itself, to repay the same amount of money, €6.7m, which had been paid out by Robert Louis-Dreyfus, the former chief executive of Adidas, three years earlier, in 2002. At that time, the money was paid directly to Mohamed bin Hammam’s company in Qatar, Kemco. Bin Hammam was then the AFC president, and the Freshfields report found that all four AFC representatives on the Fifa executive committee voted for Germany. Beckenbauer and his long-term then personal manager, Robert Schwan, were implicated in the original payment of the money to bin Hammam, in 2002.
The full, 380-page report in German included a cast list and mini-biographies of the main characters involved. It said that Radmann’s involvement in sports politics went back to the 1960s, that he had been project leader for the 1972 Munich Olympics, and in 1979 he became a director at Adidas. Working for Horst Dassler’s famous operation, he was, the report said, responsible for ‘promotion and international relations’ for ten years, until 1989. ‘At the same time’–that is, until 1989–the report says, Radmann was active as the German head of International Sport and Leisure, ISL. The Swiss court order, settling the criminal action against Fifa in relation to ISL, had stated that this company had paid bribes to heads of sports governing bodies since its formation by Dassler in 1982, although there was no indication that Radmann personally was involved or implicated. Der Spiegel had not held back in its coverage of the rotten, corrupting roots of this company, calling it Dassler’s ‘bribe company’, which paid out, in German, the ‘Schmiergeld’ (greasing money). Radmann worked after that for the rights company CWL, where Günter Netzer was now an executive. Radmann worked for other rights companies as well, and in 1996 went back to Adidas for ten years on a consultancy contract. Radmann told the Freshfields inquiry that Beckenbauer had particularly wanted and persuaded him to be involved with the 2006 World Cup bid, because he had all the ‘necessary contacts’.
The report also has a cast list of all twenty-four Fifa executive committee members at that time, in 2000, and how completely split it was according to geographical blocks. It listed that all four African representatives had voted for South Africa, as had Blatter, who wanted to make that the continent’s first World Cup. The three Concacaf and three Conmebol representatives had all voted for South Africa, too–Warner did, despite benefits bestowed on him by Germany. All eight European representatives were lined up for Germany, so the four Asian votes, for Germany, were crucial. That made it 12–11, and Dempsey’s abstention, when his mandate from Oceania was to vote for South Africa, clinched it for Germany. Had he voted, Blatter’s would have been a casting vote for South Africa; Germany would have missed its summer fairytale of fanzones, fun and reinvention by football, and the first African World Cup would have taken place four years earlier than it did.
The convoluted but at heart simple tale of the money was described by Freshfields in the report. It began in May 2002, when, in four instalments up to 8 July 2002, 6m CHF was paid into a bank account operated by a law firm in Sarnen, Switzerland. The report states that the 6m CHF came to the law firm from an account ‘stated to be held by either Robert Schwan or Franz Beckenbauer’. The law firm itself, however, said that the account was not for the benefit of Beckenbauer. A few days after each instalment was paid to the law firm, the equivalent money, to the total of 6m CHF, was paid to Mohamed bin Hammam’s company in Doha, Kemco.
The 6m CHF was repaid to Beckenbauer two months later, on 3 September 2002, and it came from Robert Louis-Dreyfus, who had stepped down the previous year from his position as the Adidas chief executive. After Dassler’s death, Adidas’ three stripes fell commercially behind the modern swoosh of Nike; the Dasslers had sold it, and Louis-Dreyfus, with partners, bought it in 1993, revitalised the brand and turned the company round. The Freshfields report says that in August 2002, Louis-Dreyfus opened an account at his private bank in Zurich, and immediately paid 10m CHF out of it, going overdrawn, to the law firm in Sarnen. This law firm then repaid the 6m CHF ‘to an account belonging to Franz Beckenbauer’ which had originally paid it to bin Hammam via the law firm. Schwan, who had made Beckenbauer fortunes in endorsements, principally with the Adidas sponsorships, but also with Knorr soups and other products, had died in July 2002, so he was no longer stated as being possibly involved with the bank account. The report states that when this money flow was put to Beckenbauer he was, according to his lawyer, ‘surprised at the insights gained’.
A further payment of 4m CHF was made by the Swiss law firm to bin Hammam’s company, two days after Beckenbauer was repaid, on 5 September 2002. The report said it was clear the money was paid to Kemco, but when they contacted bin Hammam, he denied ever receiving it. He was asked what the purpose of the money was, but answered that he could not see any connection between Freshfields’ questions about the money and the German bid to host the 2006 World Cup.
A copy of the contract the great Franz Beckenbauer signed with Jack Warner, four days before the 2000 vote on the 2006 World Cup host, was included in the Freshfields report. It is, for a lover of football, horrible. Here was Beckenbauer, signing a brief and pathetic deal to bestow various lucrative benefits on Jack Warner, who was wielding the three Concacaf votes. Beckenbauer signed it on behalf of the DFB itself, with Warner signing as the Concacaf president. There was a commitment to development in it; the DFB promised to provide coaches to Concacaf for four years; soccer equipment–‘Adidas balls, bags, boots etc.’, it promised–equivalent to $1m a year for four years; one Concacaf country a year could have a three-week training camp every year for four years, at the DFB’s expense. Then the DFB agreed to do some printing for Warner: of 30,000 Trinidad and Tobago flags, and of 30,000 tickets for Trinidad and Tobago World Cup qualifying matches. They even agreed to pay the cost of first-class flights for somebody to pick up the national flags and tickets, and to pay additional costs of air freight if necessary.
Then, at the end, Beckenbauer chucked in the 1,000 tickets to Warner for the 2006 World Cup, should it be held in Germany after all. And there it was on page 4: the signature of the superstar, familiar to any football fan of the 1970s: Franz Beckenbauer, next to a scrawl by Mr Warner. It was stated to have been signed in Rotterdam, on 2 July 2000, four days before Warner would vote alongside the twenty-three other men in the Fifa executive committee, for whether Germany would indeed host the World Cup. It is one of the most disheartening documents you could ever see with the word ‘soccer’ in it.
Freshfields said it was ‘still puzzling’ why Beckenbauer should have signed that contract with Warner. There was also no explanation whatsoever as to what it had to do with football development, to promise Jack Warner 1,000 free tickets, which he could sell presumably, at a World Cup for which he was going to vote on the host, four days later.
‘This agreement does not appear to have ever formally come into effect,’ the report says, ‘but a number of the obligations in it have been performed.’
The required approval by the DFB executive committee was never given, but nevertheless the DFB did have the tickets and flags produced for Warner, and paid for him to travel to Germany. There were DFB invoices and other documents related to this, which said ‘World Cup 2006 Development Help’.
Beckenbauer finally broke his silence following the Freshfields report with an interview given to the Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. He came up with nothing more convincing than that he was merely an unworldly ex-footballer. He ‘always blindly signed when they needed my signature’, he said. ‘If I trust someone, I’ll sign anything. Blind!’
Is this how his commercial managers, at Adidas and since, had coached der Kaiser?
The Freshfields report looked at the Dempsey abstention, too, and cited his version at the time, which was that he was under ‘intolerable pressure’ the night before the vote. In some reports Dempsey was quoted saying the pressure was from ‘highly influential European interest groups’; in another he was supposed to have complained that there were rumours he was taking money from South Africa, and he had wanted them to lose with his abstention. Both Radmann and Beckenbauer were interviewed, saying that Dempsey had never asked for money. Radmann had said the corruption allegations, of Dempsey being paid $250,000, were ‘baseless filth’. Niersbach said that Dempsey had always said openly that he had wanted to abstain.
Dempsey wrote to Egidius Braun, then the president of the DFB, after the vote, saying the night before the ballot had been the worst of his life, then that he would like to meet them when he was next in Europe: ‘It would be good to have a talk with yourself, Franz and Fedor about all the goings on, which I can’t put on paper…’
But Theo Zwanziger told Freshfields that in fact he believed Dempsey had been paid $250,000, by ISL. In the ledger of ISL payments, that figure was there, dated the night of the vote, against a recipient, E16, and Zwanziger said that he assumed it was Dempsey. The Oceania president had been mandated to vote for South Africa, and when he arrived home in New Zealand he faced a vote of no confidence for abstaining. His family have always denied that he was paid money for doing so.
It seems that in April 2005, with the Fifa executive committee’s bare majority for Germany to host the World Cup long sealed and the preparations well advanced for the Sommermärchen, presided over by the now kindly figure of Beckenbauer, Robert Louis-Dreyfus was still 10m CHF overdrawn and wanted his money back. So, the DFB arranged to repay him the money, and did so via Fifa. Freshfields found that the DFB paid Fifa €6.7m, which was the value of 10m CHF. The DFB claimed, and even noted on the payment reference, that the €6.7m was a contribution towards the opening ceremony. Freshfields were not impressed with that at all, because it was for Louis-Dreyfus:
‘This true purpose of this payment was knowingly concealed,’ the report says, adding later that it was ‘knowingly falsely declared’ by the organising committee of the 2006 World Cup, of which Beckenbauer was the president and Radmann then a consultant.
Fifa then forwarded the money to Louis-Dreyfus. Blatter was informed about it, the report states.
‘The payment amounting to €6.7m from April 2005 served as a refund of a payment previously made by Robert Louis-Dreyfus [to Mohamed bin Hammam’s company],’ the report concludes.
The report traced Wolfgang Niersbach’s failure to inform the DFB’s executive committee of these possible irregularities with the World Cup bid, after he became aware of them in June 2015, until finally he notified them in October, only after Der Spiegel had hold of the story and had made inquiries. Beckenbauer and Radmann were involved in a meeting with Niersbach about the issues, but still the DFB was not officially notified.
In June 2015, Niersbach had initiated a search of the archives and accounts, which was done by a female employee, unnamed. She insisted on doing this alone and refused any offers of help from colleagues, the report said, although she had told Freshfields she could not remember that.
‘On 22 June 2015 she removed from the archives the “Fifa 2000” folder which could not be found during the course of the investigation,’ the report said. ‘During her interview with Freshfields, this employee of Wolfgang Niersbach denied that she had destroyed the file.’
Under a concluding section: ‘How could these events happen?’ Freshfields speculate on the factors. They are not pretty reading, for the German football establishment, for Franz Beckenbauer, its icon and elder statesman, for Fedor Radmann, his long-term fixer with the contacts and connections. The questions Freshfields raised were:
Unreasonable levels of ambition?
Dependencies, in an environment inclined towards corruption?
A pronounced inclination to look the other way?
A lack of transparency?
In Beckenbauer’s interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung, he admitted that the contract with Warner ‘looked dubious’, saying: ‘Looking at it from today’s point of view, many things look funny and you wouldn’t do it like that today. But we simply meant well at the time.’
He said that Warner, typically, had said to the Germans: ‘If you are friends, do something for my confederation.’ Beckenbauer described the resulting deal with Warner as ‘a development aid package with ticketing opportunities’.
He insisted: ‘I know that I did nothing wrong. I gave my all to bring the World Cup to Germany, which we succeeded in doing. I have a clean conscience. We didn’t bribe anyone, and we didn’t have any slush funds. We only meant well. Why do people always believe negative things?’
But that blanket assertion of good intentions was not very convincing in a scandal burgeoning into the biggest ever in the great history of German football, of which Beckenbauer was the finest living product. In January 2016, even before Freshfields produced their findings, there were reports that the FBI was investigating the Germany 2006 World Cup bid. The DFB itself was reported to have commenced legal proceedings against Beckenbauer, Radmann and the other former executives in the organising committee, for repayment of the €6.7m.
Days after the report in Der Spiegel, the public prosecution office in Frankfurt launched an investigation, reportedly into the tax implications of the payments, and raided the DFB’s headquarters. On 22 March 2016, after reading the Freshfields report, the Fifa ethics committee opened an investigation into Beckenbauer and other members of the 2006 World Cup organising committee. It said in relation to Beckenbauer it was investigating ‘possible undue payments and contracts to gain an advantage in the 2006 World Cup host selection, which could constitute… bribery and corruption’. Niersbach was then banned from football for a year, for his failure to report the possible misconduct.
Then, on 1 September 2016, the attorney general in Switzerland publicly announced it had opened criminal proceedings into the DFB, in relation to the €6.7m payment, which raised allegations of fraud, criminal mismanagement, money laundering and misappropriation. The named suspects in the criminal proceedings were Franz Beckenbauer, Wolfgang Niersbach, Horst Schmidt, the DFB secretary general at the time of the payments, and Theo Zwanziger. The presumption of innocence applied to all four of them, the announcement said.
‘In particular, it is suspected that the suspects wilfully misled their fellow members of the executive board of the organising committee for the 2006 World Cup. This was presumably done by the use of false pretences or concealment of the truth, thus inducing the other committee members to act in a manner that caused DFB a financial loss,’ the attorney general said.
After all of this, it was another report by Der Spiegel, in September 2016, which finally turned the adoring German public against der Kaiser. The magazine reported that Beckenbauer had not, in fact, been the president of the World Cup organising committee out of the benevolence of his love for the mother country. In fact, he had been paid €5.5m for leading the bid and World Cup project, and that the money had been paid to the DFB bid from a betting company, Oddset, which had responded to requests for sponsorship of the bid.
In the detailed questions I sent to Radmann and Abold in preparation for writing this book, about their relationship with Beckenbauer, I put to Radmann the issues raised by the Freshfields inquiry, and the report that he is being personally sued for the €6.7m. Neither responded.
I called Beckenbauer’s brand representative and agent, Marcus Hofl, to ask for an interview with Beckenbauer and an opportunity to discuss all these allegations. The press office of Camp Beckenbauer responded, and then I emailed them a request for an interview with Beckenbauer, at whose conference I had spoken of the toxicity and corruption of Fifa, with him looking on and listening quietly. I asked a series of specific questions; about all of these issues: his closeness to Abold and Radmann, and whether there was a conflict of interest or improper commercial relationship in the huge money paid to them by Australia 2022. All the issues raised by the Freshfields report, in particular the contract he signed to grant benefits to Jack Warner, including 1,000 tickets, four days before the vote. I asked about his response to the criminal and Fifa ethics committee investigations and allegations being made against him, and the revelation that in fact he had been paid for leading the World Cup project. When I had contact with the Camp Beckenbauer people during the organising of the conference, they were highly professional, very capable and smart, and nice people to deal with. Now, really, all I wanted was for Franz to come back, and say it ain’t so. But at the time of writing, they have not responded at all.
To refresh my memories of 1974, of being captivated by watching my first World Cup, in colour, at home, aged nine, I have had a look on YouTube, to see some of it again. I looked at the Cruyff turn, and gazed on it with an awe and appreciation I didn’t have at the time. There is a gorgeous clip of Beckenbauer in the final against Holland, taking a free-kick from outside the penalty area. He had reached that time of mature authority when he seemed to stroke the ball in his sweeper role exclusively with the outside of his right foot, which increased the unruffled impression he gave of always having time. He looked like a veteran of a seniority above everybody else on the field, although, captain of his country, he was only twenty-eight. In the World Cup final, in his country, at the Olympic Stadium in his home city of Munich, full of German supporters willing victory, Beckenbauer took a stroll up to the ball, and chipped it with the outside of his right foot. It was a ridiculously sophisticated skill, of course he made it look so easy, and the ball rose and curled and dipped over the wall. It was dropping into the goal, as well, and the Holland goalkeeper, Jan Jongbloed, had to make an excellent flying save to tip the ball over the bar. It was, from Franz Beckenbauer, sublime–and so, to me, was football.