On 8 May 1968, a proud run ended with a whimper rather than a bang. It was a Wednesday night and almost 50,000 people, way above the legal capacity, had come out to Grünwalder Stadion to watch cup-holders Bayern play Milan in the second leg of the Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final.
The Italians had won the first game 2-0, a match marred by some controversy surrounding the opening goal. After a scoreless first half, Sepp Maier collected a back-pass from Franz Roth and then tried to kick the ball upfield. But Milan’s Angelo Sormani blocked the kick with his outstretched leg and the ball rebounded into the net. When Maier realised the goal would be allowed to stand, two of his teammates had to physically restrain the goalkeeper from having more than just a word with the referee.
Now, in the return match, Bayern needed two clear goals of their own against one of the best defences in the world. It had been another immensely taxing season for the team, not least because of all those friendlies. Bayern thought nothing of jetting off to Brussels or Barcelona in-between two Bundesliga games to make money. The players didn’t really mind this hectic schedule; they understood very well the money would go into their pockets, not the club’s. (Bayern made almost no profit at all during these years; everything was reinvested back into the team. This approach would lead to problems some years later.) Still, money didn’t make all that travelling less draining.
Against Milan, the machine finally broke down. Gerd Müller didn’t score, Dieter Brenninger didn’t score and even Franz Roth didn’t score. When the final whistle rang, it was still 0-0. Bayern had been eliminated from the competition. This happens to the best teams in football, but it hadn’t happened to this team in a very long time. Amazingly, Bayern had survived nineteen knock-out rounds in a row in the domestic cup and in Europe! At the twentieth hurdle, they finally fell. A week later, the Reds were knocked out of the DFB-Pokal, also in the semis, and then stumbled across the finishing line in the Bundesliga in fifth place, having been unable to win any of the last five games of the league season.
Was this Čajkovski’s fault? Not directly, of course. He had worked wonders and everyone at the club knew they were indebted to the little man for a thrilling, daringly offensive team everyone loved to watch. But more and more people wondered if Čajkovski’s style was too frenetic. Yes, it often won cup games, because the players fed off his energy and ran themselves into a frenzy. But would it ever win the league? The Bundesliga was a marathon, as the saying went, not a sprint.
And so Bayern decided to not extend Čajkovski’s contract. The fact that the decision was made even before the winter break, when the team was still in contention in all competitions, tells you how convinced the board were that the club needed a change. In November 1967, Čajkovski announced he would be looking for a new job at the end of the season. There’s little doubt that he had no choice and that this method was chosen to allow the well-liked coach to save face.
Bayern received quite a few applications from potential successors, but it took only one conversation to find the right man. In February 1968, president Wilhelm Neudecker and technical director Robert Schwan travelled to Salzburg, Austria, to meet the 38-year-old Branko Zebec. Like Čajkovski, he was Croatian – but nationality was the only thing he had in common with Čik.
Zebec was a stickler for discipline. He was stern, taciturn, distant. (A magazine profile later that year bore the headline: ‘The Man Who Rarely Laughs!’) He knew Germany well, having played for Alemannia Aachen, and he could point to some success as a coach. Zebec had guided Dinamo Zagreb to the Fairs Cup final in 1967, before he fell out with the club and was replaced by Ivica Horvat. But what made him really attractive in the eyes of Neudecker and Schwan were his ideas about the game. Zebec said the key to success was fitness. Fitness and tactics. Neudecker and Schwan signed him on the spot.
Bayern’s players quickly learned that the days of going to Čik and Rada’s home for some coffee were over. In June, before he was officially their new coach, Zebec accompanied the team on a tour of Peru, Chile and Colombia. While the players had hoped for a nice holiday, he made sure they kept in shape. Later, during the pre-season preparations, the squad was woken up at seven o’clock in the morning and told to go to the gym (before breakfast and, as Sepp Maier noted, ‘before washing yourself’). Müller, always prone to being overweight, had to wear a tracksuit over not one but two kits and then run lap upon lap – after the normal training session. He quickly lost sixteen pounds. ‘There are no improvisations during training,’ skipper Werner Olk told the press. ‘It’s all pre-planned and tailor-made to address our deficiencies.’ Hans Schiefele, the journalist and long-time Bayern member, couldn’t resist a friendly dig and noted: ‘Even Franz Beckenbauer, sometimes prone to conserving energy, participates in the full schedule.’
When the season began, Bayern were the fittest team in the league. This was a crucial asset, because the club’s squad wasn’t very big. In Zebec’s first season, 1968–69, the team went more than twelve games without making a single substitution. Eight players started every game, five of them also went the distance every time. Neudecker and Schwan weren’t opposed to making big transfers to bolster the squad – they had just signed two Austrian internationals. But they hoped Rudi Weiss, the head of the youth set-up, would continue churning out great players for the first team. The club even paid him a little bit of money now – a modest 2,000 marks per month to compensate for all the days he stood on football pitches instead of sitting in his law office. It was money well spent. The most recent of Weiss’s discoveries was Hans-Georg Schwarzenbeck. Until Zebec came in, he had often been used as a full-back, but now he was Franz Beckenbauer’s partner in the centre, his trusted and indispensable Vorstopper.
But Bayern were more than just the fittest team, they were also the most modern. Zebec, who would pioneer zonal marking and the pressing game in Germany during the 1970s, was not only fanatical about conditioning and discipline. He wanted his players to understand the game. ‘If you have the ball,’ he told Müller, ‘the other team doesn’t have it. And this means you have to do less running.’ Long before Louis van Gaal and Pep Guardiola extolled the virtues of possession football in Munich, Zebec taught Bayern how to dominate the game and wait for the right moment to strike. For Čajkovski’s young rascals, this was a radical change. But then again, they weren’t really rascals any more. They were men in their early twenties who’d had their fun – now they craved success.
Zebec repaid Neudecker’s and Schwan’s faith in his capabilities not just with the club’s first Bundesliga title but also with the first league-and-cup double. For all practical purposes, the title race was over by mid-April, when Bayern won away at Dortmund. The only goal of the game was scored by a young midfielder called Helmut Schmidt, another Rudi Weiss protégé, after a goalmouth melee and with only one minute left on the clock. The hosts loudly complained Schmidt had handled the ball, but the goal was allowed to stand. Zebec said: ‘I was not one hundred per cent satisfied, but our lead in the standings now allows me to sleep more peacefully.’ This lead had grown to five points over VfB Stuttgart and six over Hamburg (who had two games in hand).
The reference to his sleep reveals that Brank Zebec felt the pressure and wasn’t quite as cool and controlled as he often appeared to be. When Bayern defended a narrow lead away at Alemannia Aachen, his old club, he even left the bench during the final stages and went into the dressing room, unable to stand the tension any more. He missed Gerd Müller’s 88th-minute goal, which put the result beyond doubt.
Bayern finished the league season a whopping eight points ahead of surprise runners-up Aachen, to finally claim their first Bundesliga title. A week later, on 14 June 1969, the Reds met Schalke in the cup final in Frankfurt. Müller put the newly-crowned league champions ahead with a great left-footed volley from ten yards. But then something unusual happened. Schalke striker Manfred Pohlschmidt equalised with a tremendous shot from distance that flew into the top corner. It was unusual because it was the first goal Bayern had conceded in the entire cup campaign. It was also the last. Ten minutes before the break, Roth chipped a ball into Müller’s path and the forward scored the winning goal with a powerful shot from a difficult angle.
Schalke couldn’t come back after the restart because the game was played in stifling heat. Pohlschmidt later admitted: ‘We were knackered.’ Thanks to Zebec’s relentless conditioning, Bayern ran down the clock without running into major problems. Then Müller could lift his third trophy of the day. Before the match he’d been presented with the small wooden cannon that goes out to the Bundesliga’s top goalscorer and also the mounted golden ball that is the award for Germany’s Footballer of the Year.
Yet even this glorious season wasn’t without some low points. In December 1968, Bayern Munich travelled to Hannover to meet Čik Čajkovski’s new team. There’s little doubt that Bayern’s August Starek, one of the two Austrian internationals who’d joined the club in the summer, used what in another code of football would be termed ‘unnecessary roughness’. But the hosts responded in kind. Why there was so much bad blood is hard to tell, considering Čajkovski was still on excellent terms with the Bayern players and used to be Zebec’s teammate at Partizan and Yugoslavia’s national team. But rough it was. Hannover had to make a substitution after less than ten minutes; on the half-hour Roth was badly fouled and hobbled off with an ankle injury.
This was the game briefly alluded to in the introduction to this book. Sepp Maier floored an assailant, who later sued him for assault. Franz Beckenbauer was so annoyed by the hostile atmosphere that he pretended to urinate in the direction of the crowd, which earned him a hefty fine from the DFB. Even Gerd Müller lost his cool, got into an argument with a Hannover player and gave him a slap under the chin. The coach of West Germany’s youth teams, from the schoolboys to the Under-23s, had been watching the game from the stands. He later criticised the Hannover player for ‘going down spectacularly’. Still, Müller was sent off and Bayern lost the game 1-0. (Both the national youth coach and the Hannover player would go on to play important roles in Bayern’s history. The former was called Udo Lattek, the latter Jupp Heynckes.)
Maybe, just maybe, this day was the first indication that a sea change was about to take place with regard to Bayern’s image and popularity. The contrast between the austere Zebec – whose motto was: ‘Success is all that counts’ – and the charming Čajkovski, who exuded joy and carefreeness, was as striking as it was symbolic. Under Zebec, Bayern had become more businesslike and clinical, they were no longer the youthful swashbucklers everyone had loved and admired. And what was worse – they had been replaced in people’s hearts by a team that was almost the mirror image of Čajkovski’s Bayern and the opposite of Zebec’s Bayern: Borussia Mönchengladbach.
The club, which Germans tend to call just ‘Gladbach’ for the sake of brevity, had been promoted to the Bundesliga in the same year as Bayern, 1965, but needed a little bit longer to adapt. Now they were not only competitive, having finished third two years on the trot, but had developed a cavalier style that centred around counter-attacks which could resemble smash-and-grab raids. During the following decade, the question ‘Bayern or Gladbach?’ would become German football’s version of the ‘Beatles or Rolling Stones?’ debate.
Bayern would often be typecast as the Beatles in this controversy: a global brand, elegant and smart, not to mention rich, but maybe a bit too rational and too much part of the Establishment. Gladbach, on the other hand, were often described in the terms you also heard used about the Stones: wild, visceral, rebellious – successful, yes, but always and only on their own terms. Underdogs made good.
Politics played a role, too. Famously and boldly, the writer Helmut Böttiger said the long passes that were a speciality of Gladbach’s playmaker Günter Netzer ‘were football’s equivalent of the extra-parliamentary opposition’, at the time a left-of-centre outlet for student dissent. Meanwhile, Beckenbauer made an oft-quoted disparaging remark about the Social Democrats – referring to Chancellor Willy Brandt as a ‘national misfortune’ – and his club was on good terms with ultra-conservatives like Franz Josef Strauss or Alfons Goppel, the long-time prime minister of Bavaria. (Goppel began one of his first speeches after taking office in 1962 by declaring: ‘Mia san mia’ – we are who we are. But more about those weighty words later.)
Although countless articles have been written about this supposed battle between the forces of good and evil, it was largely nonsense and not only because it was Bayern left-back Paul Breitner, rather than one of the Gladbach stars, who toyed with radical Maoist chic and loved the Rolling Stones. Gladbach simply never were the gung-ho revolutionaries who won 6-5 or lost 7-6 every time they stepped onto a football pitch; Bayern never were the calculating conservatives who tried to keep a clean sheet and cynically ran down the clock when they held a lead. Life is more complicated than that. Even football is. But the juxtaposition made for good copy because, in sports, nothing beats a good rivalry.
And as the 1960s became the 1970s, there was none in German football on a national level. The first six seasons of the Bundesliga had been won by six different teams – and the seventh, 1969–70 – would be won by a seventh: Gladbach. Nobody seemed to be able to stay at or near the top for more than a few seasons. The most absurd example for this trend were Bayern’s old Bavarian rivals Nuremberg: having won the Bundesliga in 1968, they fell out of the top flight a year later. Or take 1860 Munich: the Blues had been champions as recently as 1965, but in 1970 they, too, were relegated.
These roller-coaster rides made the league exciting, because you never knew who would end up where, but it also made it confusing. All the other big footballing countries either had a version of the Rangers–Celtic duopoly or an equivalent of England’s ‘Big Five’. So perhaps the German fans secretly longed for two big teams who forced – or allowed – them to take sides even when their own, local club was going nowhere.
That one of these two teams would turn out to be Bayern was not totally improbable. After all, Munich is a big, wealthy city and Bayern had a lot of pedigree and tradition. But it may have been Bayern’s misfortune that the other consistently strong team to evolve during this period was not one of the most likely candidates – Cologne or Hamburg – but a poor club from a city of barely 150,000 inhabitants. No matter who competed with Gladbach, they would always be cast in the role of the bad guys.
There was another thing that made Borussia Mönchengladbach more attractive for many football fans during the 1970s. Although the club was, contrary to popular opinion, domestically more successful than Bayern, terrible mishaps tended to befall them in Europe. While Bayern often won when they should have lost, Gladbach regularly lost when they should have won. (Once they even lost when they won. In October 1971, Gladbach demolished Inter 7-1: the game was later annulled, because a can thrown from the stands might or might not have hit an Italian player. The match was replayed and Gladbach went out.) In other words, Borussia were tragic heroes, which is always very sexy.
Bayern, of course, preferred to be proper heroes. They didn’t even seem to mind playing the role of bad guys. Sometimes they gave the impression of relishing it.
*
There are many theories that try to explain why the relationship between Zebec and Bayern deteriorated rapidly only months after he had delivered the biggest triumph in the club’s history.
In his 2006 book about the club, the noted journalist Thomas Hüetlin says the coach became a ‘liability’ through his drinking. It might have played a role. Sepp Maier used to say that when the players saw Zebec ‘standing in the showers, wearing sunglasses, a cigarette dangling from his lips’, they knew he had been having a few the night before. Then again, blaming it all on drink is a bit of a knee-jerk reaction whenever talk turns to Zebec, because alcohol did ruin his career and, ultimately, ended his life. But most of the people who knew him very well maintain that Zebec didn’t have a serious drinking problem until a pancreas operation in 1970 vastly reduced his alcohol tolerance.
Hüetlin also says the pressure got to Zebec and that he knew the writing was on the wall when Bayern unexpectedly crashed out of the European Cup in the first round against a widely unknown opponent – and despite carrying a two-goal advantage into the second leg. This opponent was AS Saint-Étienne. The French club weren’t an entirely unknown quantity, having won their league four times in the previous six years, but they weren’t yet the great team they would become (indeed, after eliminating Bayern, they went out to Legia Warsaw in the next round).
In the home leg, Brenninger put the hosts ahead on twenty-three minutes. Roth made it 2-0 seven minutes after the restart. But what everybody talked about after the game was the goal that never came. Local lad Günther Michl, yet another Rudi Weiss find, hit the crossbar; Beckenbauer dribbled past four defenders and then missed the target by inches; Müller’s first touch let him down with only the goalkeeper to beat.
All observers agreed that Bayern should have won by a much bigger margin, but the disappointment was short-lived. Surely a two-goal lead would be enough to go through. Zebec said: ‘We know it’s going to be much harder in France and we have to be prepared for an opponent with a lot of fighting spirit. But the French have to come at us and my team is a good counter-attacking side.’ The German defender Karl-Heinz Schnellinger, who’d won the European Cup with Milan a few months earlier, said: ‘One day a Bundesliga club will go all the way in the European Cup. Maybe it’ll be Bayern. This team has been carefully constructed over many years.’
But on 1 October 1969, in the industrial town of Saint-Étienne, the carefully constructed team came apart. With sixty-one seconds gone, the Bayern defence lost the first of many aerial duels on a night none of them would forget. Robert Herbin flicked the ball on for Hervé Revelli, who scored from close range. Spurred on by their fanatical crowd, Saint-Étienne looked like a different team. Time and again, Sepp Maier had to come to the rescue, but even his heroics weren’t enough. Revelli and the outstanding Salif Keïta scored two more in the second half – with headers.
An enraged Maier later complained: ‘Only Beckenbauer went up for those balls.’ And Wilhelm Neudecker said: ‘I’m not surprised that we lost the game. I’m surprised we never had a chance.’ When a club employee told him he didn’t know how to transport Saint-Étienne’s gift – a vase – safely back to Munich, Neudecker hissed: ‘I don’t care if it gets smashed. We don’t need anything that reminds us of this game.’ Zebec, meanwhile, walked over to the press pack that was travelling with the team. ‘Please, let’s all stay up and play cards,’ he begged, dreading a sleepless night in his hotel bed.
A third, and very plausible, theory for Zebec’s decline says that the players had grown tired of his slave-driving methods. Maier still refers to the coach as ‘that sadist’ and does it only half-jokingly. Under Neudecker, Bayern Munich had become a club where players had a lot of power and were regularly consulted about club matters, first and foremost Beckenbauer (ironically, this player power would dethrone Neudecker himself many years later).
But not only the players were heard. Many people wielded influence at Bayern and possessing a fine sense of the intricate balance of power remains one of the secrets of surviving the Munich jungle. Maybe it was all too much, too complicated, too stifling for Zebec. In November 1969 he announced he would leave the club at the end of the season. Asked for comment, Neudecker coolly and somewhat cryptically said: ‘Zebec has signed a contract that says he has to report to Schwan.’ This triggered speculation that Zebec had asked the club to spend more money on transfers and had been rebutted by Schwan.
In any case, Bayern now needed a new coach for the summer. While Zebec quickly reached an agreement with VfB Stuttgart, Schwan consulted the man he considered to know more about the game than anyone else – Beckenbauer. Bayern’s sweeper drew up a mental list of names, then crossed them off one by one. Finally, he said: ‘What about Udo Lattek?’
It was a baffling suggestion. Lattek was barely thirty-five years old. He had never played professional football, and had in fact worked as a PE teacher in two small towns near Cologne until accepting an offer to join the DFB in 1965. Now he was coaching the national youth teams. And, crucially, serving as an assistant to the national manager Helmut Schön. That’s why Beckenbauer knew and rated him. All the players liked Lattek. He was the total opposite of Zebec.
Before November was over, Bayern dispatched Beckenbauer to Cologne to have a word with Lattek. ‘I’m speaking on behalf of the board of Bayern Munich,’ the player explained. ‘They want to know if you’d be interested in coaching the team.’
Stunned, Lattek hesitated for a moment. He had been Schön’s assistant coach for many years and, according to the unwritten rules under which the DFB operated, this meant he was being groomed for the main job and was set to become national coach as soon as Schön retired, either in four or in eight years. Still, Beckenbauer’s offer was the chance of a lifetime. The highly ambitious Lattek knew he had to grab it with both hands even if that meant jumping in at the deep end. He told Beckenbauer that, yes, he would be interested in succeeding Zebec.
Then he packed his bags and travelled to a small town south of Hannover, where his national Under-19 team would be playing Denmark. On a frozen pitch, West Germany went ahead after thirteen minutes. The goalscorer represented TSG Ulm and his name was Uli Hoeness. In the second half, Lattek brought on a player from Freilassing, very close to the Austrian border, called Paul Breitner. The game ended 1-1.
After the match, Lattek approached Hoeness and asked him if he had signed a contract somewhere. Lattek knew that almost a dozen Bundesliga clubs were courting the fleet-footed seventeen-year-old midfielder, 1860 Munich among them. He also knew that the negotiations were complicated, because Hoeness was bright and strong-minded. The player was adamant about signing an amateur contract because it would allow him to play for West Germany at the 1972 Olympics (the Games were closed to professional athletes until the 1980s). He also said he wanted to study at university on the side – preferably business administration, or maybe English literature – and thus needed some sort of office job at the club to earn money until he signed professional forms. Such determination stumped many club officials, who were used to players being far more simple-minded. So the various talks dragged on, which is why Hoeness told Lattek that he was close to signing for VfB Stuttgart but hadn’t yet done so.
‘Do me a favour,’ Lattek said. ‘Wait just a little bit longer before you commit yourself.’ Hoeness promised he would.
Less than three weeks later, Robert Schwan parked his car in front of the Hoeness family’s butcher’s shop in Ulm. Schwan made the young player a good but not great offer. There were soon rumours that Hoeness had been promised a new car and a huge signing-on bonus in return for pledging his allegiance to Bayern, but this has never been substantiated and seems unlikely. Hoeness later said he liked Schwan’s no-nonsense manner and the idea that he was joining a club with a reputation for giving young players a chance. And, of course, the fact that Schwan told him Lattek would be the new coach. In January, Hoeness announced he would become a Bayern player. His close friend Paul Breitner soon followed suit.
Ludwig Maierböck – yes, the same 1860 man who had missed out on Gerd Müller six years earlier – was boiling with indignation when the news spread. He claimed to have reached a verbal agreement with Breitner as early as August and with Hoeness back in October. ‘Maierböck had been scouting me since I was fifteen,’ Breitner recently admitted. ‘He came to our house and said he wanted me to play for 1860. But he never hit upon the idea of presenting a contract to my parents or myself. 1860 simply missed the boat.’
While these momentous events were happening behind the scenes, Bayern dropped out of the title race. First they lost the derby with 1860, although the Blues were mired in the drop zone, then they couldn’t protect a lead against Essen, another relegation candidate.
On Friday, 13 March 1970, the phone rang in Lattek’s Cologne flat. He glanced at the bedside clock through drowsy eyes. It was 4.30 in the morning. He instinctively knew that this was the phone call he had secretly been expecting since the conversation with Beckenbauer. Lattek picked up the receiver and listened. Then he woke his wife. He told her that Bayern had fired Branko Zebec and that he had to be in Munich as quickly as possible.
At first there was very little to indicate that Bayern had entered their glory decade – and sowed the seeds for an unprecedented period of dominance – when the club signed Lattek, Hoeness and Breitner. Quite the contrary. Some of the established players resented the youngsters because of their cockiness. They also thought that the two pals were a bit too close to Lattek, the man who had coached them before and who had signed them. Even Schwan, who often made a point of putting the duo in their place, was obviously fond of them. Schwan, who could quickly lose his patience in the presence of stupidity, liked Hoeness and Breitner because they were smart. Some others felt there was a fine line between being smart and being a smart alec.
Hoeness had been a Bayern player for less than four weeks when the Reds played a warm-up match against his old club, Ulm. In the first half, he played on the right wing, while the international Erich Maas, who had been signed for this position from Brunswick for a considerable sum, sat on the bench. After the break, Maas came on and Hoeness moved into midfield. When a reporter later asked Hoeness about the switch, he replied: ‘I was played on the wing, which is not my normal position, to teach Maas a lesson.’
Many teammates felt this was a bit much, coming from an eighteen-year-old. Hoeness was not only criticising the coach for playing him out of position (in contrast to Breitner, who quietly accepted that he was put at left-back), he was also showing up Maas, not to mention that he was making internal matters public. Next he rubbed Beckenbauer and Müller up the wrong way. Things got so bad, the journalist Peter Bizer wrote a few years later, ‘that only an open debate moderated by Lattek and Schwan prevented a palace revolt against this Swabian greenhorn’. During the debate, Lattek was accused of giving Hoeness preferential treatment, which he vehemently denied.
The talk must have cleared the air. Bayern went into the seven-week winter break in first place in the Bundesliga, one point ahead of title-holders Gladbach. They had also reached the quarter-finals of the Fairs Cup (just about to be renamed the UEFA Cup) and the round of 16 in the DFB-Pokal. Finishing off a near-perfect first half of the season was the news that Gerd Müller had been voted European Footballer of the Year 1970, the first German to win this honour. Bobby Moore came second, Luigi Riva third and another Bayern player, Beckenbauer, fourth.
But the new year dampened the mood. First Bayern were played off the park by Liverpool in the Fairs Cup. Then they went into the last matchday of the Bundesliga season level on points with Gladbach. Both teams played away from home: Bayern at MSV Duisburg, safe in mid-table, and Gladbach at Eintracht Frankfurt, knee-deep in the relegation fight. With fifty-five minutes gone, the soon-to-be fierce rivals were still level, because Gladbach were drawing 1-1 in Frankfurt while the game in Duisburg was scoreless.
And yet the two games were very different. Calling the atmosphere in Duisburg hostile would be an understatement. Beckenbauer was booed whenever he touched the ball. In the very first minute, Duisburg’s defender Hartmut Heidemann brutally fouled Roth, who was clear through on goal. By all accounts, Heidemann’s teammate Ɖorđe Pavlić kicked everything that moved. The Duisburg players were just as fired up as their fans for a game that meant nothing to them.
Deep into the second half, Bayern were hit on the break and Rainer Budde gave Duisburg the lead. Spectators ran onto the pitch, waving blue-and-white flags. Fifteen minutes later, Budde scored again, probably from an offside position. There was another pitch invasion, Maier was hit in the head and had to come off (Duisburg’s star player, Bernard Dietz, is still convinced that Maier was faking the injury in an attempt to get the match annulled, but eyewitnesses said that Maier was indeed knocked down by a fan). So chaotic was the game that the referee allowed Udo Lattek to make a third substitution before howls of protest from the crowd alerted him to the fact that this was against the rules. Gladbach, meanwhile, won 4-1 and claimed the title again.
Kicker magazine said: ‘Bayern shouldn’t hang their heads. Second place is something. It’s even a lot for coach Udo Lattek. He has been accused of bringing in too many young players and some experts predicted failure. But the young players came through.’ The coach had indeed put a lot of faith in youth. Besides Hoeness and Breitner, he had also made 22-year-old Rainer Zobel a regular and was often playing 21-year-old Edgar Schneider. But Lattek knew that second place would be forgotten soon. He needed a title, and it was one of his kids who helped him to it.
More than 15,000 Bayern fans travelled to Stuttgart to see their team play Cologne in the cup final on 19 June 1971. They were rewarded with a great game. Cologne went ahead early, but the best player on the pitch, Beckenbauer, equalised after the break. Bayern were then reduced to ten men when right-back Herwart Koppenhöfer retaliated against Hannes Löhr and was sent off. But they should have won the final in regular time, because in the last minute, Müller was blatantly wrestled to the ground in the penalty area. The referee shook his head and waved play-on. He did the same when Müller was brought down in the box again five minutes into extra time. Then Zobel hit the underside of the crossbar with a long-range shot. Nobody knew whether the ball crossed the line as it came down or not. The referee said no. Then Brenninger, in his 335th and last competitive game for Bayern, missed an open goal. In the 118th minute, Müller was unmarked five yards in front of the target, but Cologne’s goalkeeper made an amazing save and turned the shot around the post.
Lattek stared at the running track. He must have wondered what he had to do to get a break. The ensuing corner was cleared and the ball reached Schneider. He rode a tackle and fired the ball into the top corner from twenty yards. Lattek jumped up, raced onto the pitch and hectically yelled instructions at Breitner. A minute later he was in the air again, this time to celebrate. As Čajkovski used to do, he embraced every single player. He knew how important this win was for the team. Few things weld a side together more thoroughly than winning a final, even more so when the team had been reduced to ten men.
But it was also important for him. Three decades later, when Bayern celebrated their 100th birthday with a big party, Lattek spotted Edgar Schneider. He walked over to the man who’d never really broken through at the club, pointed a finger at him and beamed: ‘There’s the man who won my first cup!’
The early 1970s were a critical period for German football, littered with tumultuous events. In June 1971, the big Bundesliga bribe scandal broke which kept writers and lawyers busy – and fans disgusted – for years. Eventually, two teams were demoted (Offenbach and Bielefeld) and more than fifty players and officials from ten different clubs were suspended, some for life, for agreeing to throw a large number of league games, most of them relating to the relegation fight.
Bayern Munich and Borussia Mönchengladbach were not involved, although the names of both clubs came up from time to time during the investigations. Duisburg’s goalkeeper Volker Danner claimed to have been offered 12,000 marks (at the time the equivalent of £1,400) for letting in a few goals in the final game of the 1970–71 season when his club hosted Bayern. He didn’t say who made him the offer, only that it came ‘from Munich’. Danner said he refused to throw the match. Ironically, he was later convicted and suspended for having received 2,000 marks from an unknown and unnamed source for winning this game, which helped Gladbach claim the league title. (It was illegal to accept bonus payments from third parties.)
These few lines alone will illustrate how unsavoury and murky the whole affair was. Many players had accepted bribes because they didn’t make much money. Many clubs had paid bribes because they feared nothing more than dropping from the Bundesliga to the semi-pro, multi-tiered lower flight. And so the most immediate effects of the scandal, on a technical level, were the abolishment of all caps on wages and transfers and the creation of a professional second division, the 2. Bundesliga.
But more dramatic were the psychological effects. Just a few years before the 1974 World Cup on home soil, football was suddenly a dirty business, populated by crooks. In the mid-1960s, more than 7.5 million fans per year attended Bundesliga games; in the early 1970s, this figure dropped to 5.3 million.
Not all was doom and gloom, though. Luckily for German football, just when many fans became disillusioned with the game, the best side in the country’s history took to the field. In 1972, a universally admired West German team won the European Championships in great style. Beckenbauer had never been more graceful under pressure, a dashing Netzer was at the top of his game. Two years later, the national team – starring six Bayern players – won the World Cup. Although this side is not as fondly remembered, let alone as revered, as the 1972 team, those successes greatly helped restore football’s reputation.
In-between these two sporting triumphs, something else happened. In 1973, the owner of Jägermeister, the company producing the digestif, took on the DFB – and won. The man’s name was Günter Mast (his uncle had started the company) and he’d got it into his head that his local club, Brunswick, should endorse his product on their shirts. The DFB stopped him, whereupon Mast simply convinced the club’s members to change the badge and use the Jägermeister logo instead. It was the beginning of a legal tug-of-war that ended when the DFB decided to legalise shirt sponsorship, four years ahead of the English FA.
However, for the team whose shirt would soon be the most coveted and lucrative, the most important event during these years was something else entirely – the 1972 Olympics in Munich.
For the Games, the city built a ground that even now, more than four decades later, is breathtakingly beautiful: the Olympic Stadium. Designed by the architect Günter Behnisch and the engineer Frei Otto and situated in Schwabing-West, five miles north of Grünwalder Stadion, the stadium quickly became a Munich landmark, not least because of the sweeping and transparent canopy that covers three of the four stands.
It’s not, however, a perfect place for football. Due to the running track around the pitch, one is not as close to the action as a modern fan would like to be. The elegantly curved stands rise gently rather than steeply, impeding the view from the lower rows. The open, light construction means the wind can pass freely through the ground, so the Olympic Stadium tends to be a cold, wet place on inhospitable days. And yet it’s still a brilliantly atmospheric ground as long as the conditions are right and enough people come out to watch.
Both Bayern and 1860 Munich decided to move into the Olympic Stadium as tenants, starting with the 1972–73 season. One reason was the capacity of around 80,000, twice what Gründwalder Stadion could hold. (Today, Bayern fans may sneer that the Olympic Stadium was too big for 1860, but in fact the ground’s attendance record is held by the Blues. It was set in a second-division game against Augsburg in August 1973, when more than 90,000 were on hand, many without tickets.) The other reason was the deplorable state of Grünwalder Stadion. In January 1971, the main stand had burned to the ground, probably a case of arson, and soon a thunderstorm would destroy the roof of the terrace.
The new stadium was officially opened on 26 May 1972, three months before the Olympics, with an international between West Germany and the Soviet Union. (Coincidentally, these two teams would also meet in the European Championship final a few weeks later.) Six Bayern players saw action on that day: Maier, Beckenbauer, Schwarzenbeck, Hoeness, Breitner and Müller, who scored all the goals in a 4-1 rout. What they didn’t know was that they would be playing at this very place with their club a lot sooner than planned.
For the first and so far only time in Bundesliga history, the last matchday of the 1971–72 season amounted to a final. Bayern were leading Schalke by one point and would be hosting them on the evening of 28 June 1972, a Wednesday. For a 2005 book on the history of the Olympic Stadium, Uli Hoeness looked back upon that magical summer and said: ‘We were supposed to relocate in the new season. But Wilhelm Neudecker, our president at the time, knew how attractive the new stadium was – and how much bigger the revenue would be for Bayern if he moved the match.’
Even Neudecker was surprised by the response when he let it be known the Schalke match would be staged at the Olympic Stadium. The match sold out in just two hours; some people bought as many as 100 tickets; countless fans had to be turned away. Neudecker apologised, promised to limit the number of tickets a single person could purchase in the future and said: ‘We just didn’t expect such a rush.’ He wasn’t being coquettish. At Grünwalder Stadion, Bayern had sold barely 900 season tickets.
Neudecker knew how hard it would be to fill a ground as huge as the Olympic Stadium on a regular basis, which is why he reduced ticket prices – a smart but unusual decision, considering he was moving to a much more comfortable, modern location. (At Grünwalder Stadion, the best seats cost 25 marks. At the Olympic Stadium, a seat on the roofless East Stand was 10 marks for non-members, only 5 marks – less than 65 pence in early 1970s money – for members.)
But of course everyone wanted to watch the 1972 game. The eventual 5-1 scoreline seems to indicate a one-sided match, but it wasn’t quite like that. Early on, Maier came out to collect a corner but missed the cross completely, whereupon Hoeness had to clear the ball off the line with a header. Bayern’s two full-backs – the Dane Johnny Hansen and Breitner – made it 2-0 before the break, but Klaus Fischer, a former 1860 player, pulled one back for Schalke. So the title race wasn’t decided until Bayern’s left-winger Wilhelm Hoffmann converted a Müller through ball for the third goal midway through the second half. Ten minutes from time, Hoeness scored his team’s 100th goal of the season, then Beckenbauer put the finishing touch on a glorious campaign when he converted a free kick from the edge of the penalty area with a nonchalance that was regal indeed.
It was the first and as yet only time that a Bundesliga team has recorded a century of goals. In the same season reigning champions Gladbach lagged far behind with an otherwise impressive eighty-two. In fact, there were only three years during the 1970s when Gladbach managed to rack up more goals than Bayern. Sometimes the Reds outscored their rivals even when the latter won the league (as in 1970, 1976 and 1977). So much for the supposedly attacking Gladbach and the allegedly calculating Bayern.
The Schalke game pocketed the club a cool 1.1 million marks. For the coming seasons, Neudecker hoped for an average attendance of 35,000 and calculated that a normal league match should earn the club at least 250,000 marks. The president would reach his goal, but not immediately. During Bayern’s first full season in the Olympic Stadium, 1972–73, the club drew 31,000 per game. It was by far the best figure in the league but still below Neudecker’s target. Who knows, the reason may have been that his team was just too good.
In early October, Bayern met Schalke again and won easily, 5-0. After the game, Schalke’s coach Ivica Horvat shook his head and said: ‘What were we doing here in the first place?’ Then he predicted Bayern would win the Bundesliga by twenty points. (Eventually, the lead was only eleven points – but since these were the days of the two-points-for-a-win rule, it was a heavy margin nonetheless and set a league record that would stand until 1999.) Horvat spoke for many opponents: Udo Lattek’s team was just overpowering.
The Reds scored five or more goals on eight different occasions. They won the title with four games in hand following a 6-0 thrashing of Kaiserslautern. Müller scored five goals that day, the second but not the last time he’d pull off this feat in a league match. Actually, Müller finished the season with sixty-six goals in all competitions (including the short-lived League Cup). It was a European record that survived for almost four decades, until Lionel Messi finally broke it.
After the Kaiserslautern game, Beckenbauer said: ‘Of our three league titles, this was certainly the one that came easiest to us.’ A writer who was present in the dressing room reported: ‘Bayern celebrated their trophy the way you celebrate a constantly recurring event. The champagne didn’t flow freely, it was passed around in glasses.’ He quoted Maier as saying: ‘We’re all creatures of habit.’ An even more famous quote popped out of Breitner’s mouth after the final matchday. Together with a couple of other players, he ran a few laps of honour, then he walked into the dressing room – and was stunned to see that the rest of the team had already left. Breitner undressed, grabbed a bottle of champagne, jumped into the pool and loudly yelled: ‘Does nobody at this shitty club know how to party?’
When photos of the naked Breitner and reports of his rhetorical question appeared in newspapers, Neudecker was furious. He was annoyed by the player’s antics, anyway. Breitner wore an afro. He was about to adopt a little girl from Vietnam (as much a political statement as a humanitarian one at a time when opinion about the war in Southeast Asia still divided the nation). A year earlier, he had been photographed reading Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book and not long after the end of the season an even more famous image would make the rounds, showing him under a Mao poster, studying the Beijing Review. Neudecker threatened to sell Breitner, saying he demanded more discipline from someone ‘who earns as much as ten workers put together’. Breitner told the press: ‘As long as I play well, I can get away with anything. Even a political opinion.’ As it turned out, he was right.
However, this blasé attitude – the aristocratic indifference with which Bayern seemed to take success for granted – fostered resentment even more. Six months after their second league title in a row, in December 1973, the players were sitting in their coach, ready to leave for Bremen airport, when about twenty yobs blocked the exit. Beckenbauer later said they were yelling: ‘Maier-manure, Müller-shit, Beckenbauer-piss!’ Maier said all he heard was: ‘Kill those Bayern pigs!’ When the Bremen fans started throwing rocks, a group of Bayern players left the coach and distributed a few punches until the loudmouths legged it, then the team left town. Needless to say, they had won the football match, too.
But no matter whether you liked Bayern or hated them, you had to admit that they delivered some mightily entertaining games during the 1973–74 season. Actually, these were the sort of games people normally attributed to Gladbach. At Schalke, in September, Bayern conceded five goals before the break, but came away with a 5-5 draw, with Müller scoring four goals. Six weeks later, Bayern raced into a 4-1 lead away at Kaiserslautern – and then conceded six goals in half an hour to lose 7-4.
In early May 1974, the title race was still completely open, because table-topping Bayern led Gladbach by only a single point. With two games left in the season, the mouth-watering prospect of another quasi-final seemed to become reality, as Gladbach would be playing against Bayern on the last day. But it was not to be. Gladbach were beaten on the penultimate weekend by Rhineland rivals Fortuna Düsseldorf and the Reds had won their third straight Bundesliga title. They could afford to stumble across the Gladbach pitch on the last matchday like drunken men and lose 5-0.
This isn’t a turn of phrase – they were indeed drunk. Contrary to what Breitner had said about the club a year earlier, the Bayern players had partied so hard that the smell of alcohol on their breaths might have put off their opponents. But of course it was not the Bundesliga title they had been celebrating. It was a much bigger trophy.