It was obvious there was something wrong with the team. As the noted weekly Die Zeit said a few days before Christmas 1978: ‘There can be no doubt that the Hungarian coach Lóránt has not done a lot to ease the tense atmosphere. After each unsatisfying result, the readers of Munich’s five daily newspapers could expect to hear about the feud between the players, the coach and the president. Noticeable in this context was the aversion the coach developed to those players with Abitur [the rough equivalent of A-levels]: Jupp Kapellmann became a sub, Uli Hoeness went to Nuremberg, Paul Breitner hardly exchanged a word with Lóránt any more.’
Hoeness had indeed left Bayern in October, because Lóránt wasn’t giving him a game. (Perhaps with good reason – five months later the player was forced to finish his career on account of his knee problems.) And so Hoeness missed the strange and perhaps fittingly spectacular denouement to the Hungarian’s brief but turbulent reign. In early November, Bayern travelled to Amsterdam to play in Johan Cruyff’s testimonial. As mentioned before, the Reds took Ajax to the cleaners, winning 8-0. Almost thirty years later, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge apologised on Dutch television, saying his team’s emphatic victory must have felt like a slur to Ajax, not to mention Cruyff.
However, as an explanation for what happened, Rummenigge added that the team had felt unseemly treated by their hosts. And indeed, after Müller opened the scoring by volleying a long Sepp Maier punt past goalkeeper Piet Schrijvers, he seemed to be making a point of dedicating his celebration to a particularly hostile section of the crowd. (Many years later, Hoeness failed to sign a young Frank Rijkaard to Bayern, because the player was represented by the agent Cor Coster, who happened to be Johan Cruyff’s father-in-law. Apparently, Coster still bore a grudge.)
Barely four weeks after this contentious game, Bayern played away at Fortuna Düsseldorf. After twenty seconds, a Maier punt didn’t get quite as far as it had done in Amsterdam. It was intercepted by Fortuna’s centre-forward Emanuel Günther. He laid the ball off for Klaus Allofs, who scored from twenty yards. After an hour, it was 4-1. With fifteen minutes left, it was 6-1. On eighty-seven minutes, a Günther header from a tight angle wrong-footed Maier for a final score of 7-1. The result is to this day Bayern’s heaviest defeat away from home.
The television cameras captured Lóránt as he made for the dressing rooms. He was certainly unhappy and would later tell his assistant: ‘Pál, this means trouble.’ But he walked steadily and seemed light on his feet. Still, Bayern announced on the following day that Lóránt suffered from a severe meniscus injury (sustained, it seemed, while ice-skating with his young daughter), could hardly move and would be unable to be on the bench for the next game. As it turned out, he would never again be on any Bayern bench.
In order to gain some time, Neudecker did what football officials in his situation often do. Having sacked the number-one man, he promoted the assistant on an interim basis. So it came about that the very antithesis of Lóránt coached the team on the following weekend. Pál Csernai had never been a great player – spending six years at Kickers Stuttgart, mostly in the second division – or a successful coach. But the Bayern players liked him. He was polite, reserved and pleasant, though perhaps a bit too full of himself in a quiet way. He liked the music of Giuseppe Verdi and could play the violin. While Lóránt sat on the bench wearing a tracksuit top, Csernai prided himself on his dress sense; he was the Pep Guardiola of the 1980s. Search for der Mann mit dem Seidenschal, the man with the silk scarf, on Google and the first results all deal with Csernai.
In other words, he was certainly not the kind of man Neudecker wanted for the team. And you can’t say that Csernai did a particularly good job of advertising his abilities. He lost two of his first three games in charge. The second of these was a match in Frankfurt on a foggy, depressing day in early February 1979. There was no score for seventy minutes, then the hosts found the target twice. Csernai told sub Norbert Janzon, a 28-year-old striker who’d been signed from Karlsruher SC, to get ready. Eight minutes from time, the coach brought Janzon on. For Gerd Müller.
You sometimes read that it was the first time in Müller’s career that he had been taken out of a game. That’s not true, of course. He’d come off with a minor ailment as recently as November. But Müller hadn’t been subbed for either tactical or performance reasons and with a game still on the line since April 1971. That Csernai, a virtual unknown who had never won anything as a player or coach, dared to do this proved that he had a bit more steel than people thought, but it still earned him bad press. ‘One may confidently assume that a coach who’s considered a nobody in the business was trying to make a name for himself at the expense of a player of outstanding merit,’ Kicker magazine said. The Sunday paper Welt am Sonntag published an open letter from former international Willi Schulz addressed to Neudecker. Schulz accused the president of ‘standing idly by and watching’ while ‘Csernai orchestrated a campaign against Gerd Müller’. The coach himself countered the criticism by saying: ‘I just don’t understand why such a drama is made of the substitution. I was often subbed towards the tail end of my career. That’s football. Only performance counts. Müller has been out of form for weeks.’
The striker regarded the substitution as an ‘act of revenge’ for having been one of the few loyal Lóránt men. Then he said: ‘As far as I’m concerned, Csernai doesn’t exist.’ Ten days after the game, Müller sent Neudecker a letter in which he asked to be released from his contract with immediate effect – after 607 competitive games for Bayern Munich, in which he had scored an astonishing 566 goals. He was without doubt the greatest striker the club and the country, probably the world, had ever seen. But he was thirty-three years old and, as Csernai correctly pointed out: ‘He lacks stamina and he isn’t moving about as much as he used to.’ The club relented and, in the first week of March, Müller announced he was going to join Fort Lauderdale Strikers in the North American Soccer League to play alongside George Best and Teófilo Cubillas.
On 23 April, while the Bundesliga season was heating up, Müller and his wife left Munich for Miami. After almost fifteen years in Bayern’s red shirts, there was no formal farewell, no testimonial, not even a few words of gratitude or a round of applause from the fans. Sepp Maier publicly wondered why ‘everyone except Rainer Ohlhauser left in anger. Andersson and Torstensson weren’t given as much as a bouquet of flowers, while Franz even had to pay money to get out.’
There was indeed at the time a culture of ruthless professionalism at the club that could, and would, very easily cross into cold-heartedness. As Breitner once said: ‘There was no room for feelings.’ This would radically change under Uli Hoeness, but for Müller it meant he left the club he’d helped build in acrimony. ‘I’m looking forward to Fort Lauderdale and finally playing football again,’ he said. ‘But I hope they don’t think here comes the great magician who’ll run rings round everyone. I’ll certainly need time to adapt.’ In his first season in Florida, Müller scored nineteen goals and set up seventeen in twenty-five games to finish third in the list of the league’s most productive forwards.
Although Neudecker had backed the coach in the brief but fierce struggle for power with Müller, he still regarded Csernai as a man living on borrowed time. This is why the president rather than the coach decided who would be given the captain’s armband, now that both Beckenbauer and Müller were gone: Sepp Maier (a choice the president would come to rue).
You could understand why Neudecker wasn’t happy with Csernai – the results didn’t improve. Quite the contrary. On 10 March 1979, Bayern were beaten 4-0 at home by relegation candidates Arminia Bielefeld. It was, and still is, one of the club’s worst home defeats in league history. Needless to say, the Bielefeld debacle was the final straw and put Csernai in an untenable position; he would have to go. However, the players pleaded with Neudecker not to sack the Hungarian. Eventually, the president agreed to a bargain. Looking back on those eventful days and weeks, Sepp Maier says: ‘Neudecker promised us that the coach could stay if we remained unbeaten in our next two Bundesliga games, away at Brunswick and Mönchengladbach.’
The deal alone tells you a lot about how powerful the players had become, especially since Breitner’s return, and perhaps also that Neudecker, who was now in his mid-sixties and had been at the club’s helm for almost seventeen years, was no longer as vigorous and authoritative as he used to be.
The first of the two matches in question pitted the Reds not only against Breitner’s old team, Brunswick, but also against Werner Olk. The man who’d played 266 league games for Bayern and captained the team between 1965 and 1970 had replaced Branko Zebec as Brunswick coach at the beginning of the season. He was under a lot of pressure because his team hadn’t won since October. But of course the same went for Csernai and his players. Maier was running a fever, Breitner had spent the week before the game in bed with the flu and lost over a stone, Rummenigge was suffering from ligament problems. But somehow they all hung in there and ground out an ugly scoreless draw. The press later called it ‘the worst Bundesliga game of the entire season’ and Olk was sacked a few days later. But Maier and Breitner were happy. The deal was still on.
Or so they thought. But when the squad arrived at Hannover airport to fly to Munich, a journalist informed Breitner there were rumours that Neudecker had signed a new coach – none other than Max Merkel, the notorious slave-driver and former 1860 Munich gaffer. During a stopover in Frankfurt, the players saw an interview with their president on television that confirmed their worst fears. According to Thomas Hüetlin’s book about Bayern, Maier hissed: ‘We were so glad he had sacked this arsehole Lóránt – and now he goes out and gets an even bigger one!’ Talking to a reporter, the goalkeeper phrased his concerns a bit more diplomatically: ‘Mister Neudecker tells us all the time that the club has to save money and now he goes out and gets a coach who doesn’t come cheap, as we all know.’
For many years, the story went that Breitner and Maier called the team together on the airport and held a vote on how to proceed. Hüetlin says that the two team leaders couldn’t find Klaus Augenthaler and second-stringers Peter Gruber and Willi Reisinger because the three had located a television set and were watching West Germany’s national qualifying event for the 1979 Eurovision Song Contest. As much as I want to believe this story, not least because the event was won by an over-the-top Eurotrash band called Genghis Khan, Breitner and Maier both state there was no vote. They claim they just knew how the squad felt and which steps needed to be taken (which is a polite way of saying they were running this team). And so, thirty minutes before midnight on a long and busy Saturday, the goalkeeper called his president on the telephone.
‘Mister Neudecker,’ Maier said, ‘as the captain of this team I have to tell you that we don’t approve of your decision.’
Neudecker’s neck veins bulged. Of course I wasn’t there to actually see it, but if ever a man’s neck veins had good reason to bulge, this was it. Struggling to contain himself, Neudecker replied that Maier was just an employee of the club and that the president most certainly didn’t need his approval when making any kind of decision.
‘If you insist on having a new coach,’ Maier said, ‘please meet the team at Säbener Strasse on Monday and explain why you reneged on your promise to give us two games. We will be there – but we will refuse to train.’
Now Neudecker’s last remnant of composure vanished. He yelled at Maier, accused him of being an anarchist and said the goalkeeper sounded like a trade union leader threatening a strike. Maier hung up on him.
When the players arrived in dribs and drabs at the training ground on Monday morning, they were relieved that Max Merkel was nowhere to be seen; instead Pál Csernai was there and also board members Karl Pfab and Willi O. Hoffmann. But at the same time, the players were anxious. As far as they knew, no team had ever done anything like this, blackmailed their own president. How would he react?
Neudecker had had one day to think the situation through and calm down. He had done the former but not the latter, because when he opened the door to the conference room at nine o’clock, he was still visibly disgusted. His voice, though, was, all things considered, calm. ‘Ah, the great chairman,’ he said, shooting a contemptuous glance at Maier. ‘Well, if that’s how things stand, I resign from my post here and now.’ Without waiting for a response, he turned around and walked out. The players looked at each other in stunned silence. Then they changed into tracksuits and did what footballers do on a Monday morning: they held a training session. Under Pál Csernai.
Two hours later, club secretary Fembeck distributed a personal press release from Neudecker. It said: ‘Led by captain Sepp Maier, the team has come out against Max Merkel and thus also against myself. I cannot tolerate having the running of the club circumscribed in this manner. By stepping down, I draw the necessary consequences.’ When Hans Schiefele – the former Bayern player turned journalist who all those years ago had told Neudecker to sign Čik Čajkovski – asked Breitner for comment, the player said: ‘It wasn’t primarily about Max Merkel. Basically, it was about having a new coach. We just don’t see a reason for another managerial change. Mister Csernai is a good choice.’
Everybody wanted a piece of Neudecker on this day that had shaken the club to its foundations. That explains why it was hard for treasurer Hoffmann to get hold of the man who had been his president until the morning. Finally, at three in the afternoon, Neudecker answered the phone.
‘Will you take back your resignation?’ Hoffmann wanted to know.
‘No way, I’m not even thinking about it,’ Neudecker replied. If he was expecting his trusted fellow board members, Hoffmann and Pfab, to follow his example, what he heard next must have given him the rest.
‘Okay, fine,’ Hoffmann replied. ‘If that’s the case, then I’m going to run for president.’
According to Hoffmann, who says he and Pfab didn’t have any problems with Maier or the rest of the team and thus couldn’t see the need to resign from the board, too, his announcement left Neudecker speechless, which may have been a first. Bayern’s 6,500 members soon received notice that the club had called an extraordinary general meeting for 24 April, during which a new president would be elected.
Meanwhile, the nation’s eyes were on Bayern’s players. These men had been under pressure to perform for many years and for many reasons. But during the days following Neudecker’s resignation, they realised they were now under a form of pressure none of them had ever known. Just a few weeks after Müller’s unfortunate sendoff, the country was in uproar over Bayern yet again. Most people sided with Neudecker and criticised the players’ behaviour as outrageous insolence. National coach Jupp Derwall even refused to call up Maier for an upcoming qualifier against Turkey. There were no two ways about it: the team simply had to do well in their next game to prove they were no deluded insurgents but knew what they were doing. They had to prove that Csernai was indeed the right man. As if somebody had scripted all this, the next game was away at old rivals Gladbach. Who were coached by Udo Lattek.
So many things had changed in such a short time, so many Bayern icons had left. But on 24 March 1979, five days after Neudecker had stepped down, the players in red made it abundantly clear that they were still Bayern Munich – because they rose to the occasion like only Bayern could. None other than Hans-Georg Schwarzenbeck opened the scoring after less than ten minutes. Norbert Janzon, the man for whom Gerd Müller had come off in Frankfurt, scored a brace. And Karl-Heinz Rummenigge netted four goals.
At half-time, with the score 5-1, the designated new president Willi O. Hoffmann walked into the dressing room. Disregarding the fact that forty-five minutes of football still had to be played, he informed the team that he had just booked a posh Munich restaurant for the evening. ‘We’ll party until morning!’ he promised. And they did. Hoffmann says that ‘the champagne was flowing until seven o’clock’. It may have been the night he acquired his legendary nickname, because people still know him as Champagne Willi.
Bayern’s 7-1 triumph not only signalled the end of Neudecker’s austere regime and the beginning of Hoffmann’s jovial reign. It also underlined that the end of Gladbach’s golden age had come – and kickstarted the Reds’ resurgence. Bayern went on a seven-game unbeaten run and finished the season in fourth place, a valuable UEFA Cup slot.
After the game, Breitner talked to a film crew that was capturing his team’s season for a documentary that had been planned long before anyone could imagine how colourful the campaign would turn out to be. ‘We had to play against God and man,’ he told the camera. ‘Everybody wished us the worst, because what happened had never happened in German football before. Opposing the coach and the president, doing something that by German standards was revolutionary, is something Germans normally don’t accept. And certainly not from well-paid footballers who are not supposed to speak their minds.’
In April, Hoffmann easily won the vote and became Bayern’s new president. (A professor of business administration by the name of Fritz Scherer followed him as the club’s treasurer.) The son of a simple toolmaker, Hoffmann was not only a Bayern man through and through – he had seen his first game in 1938, when he was eight – but also a dyed-in-the-wool Bavarian. He was very fond of Tracht and you rarely saw him without his traditional hat, complete with the tuft of chamois hair known as Gamsbart. Only seven months after becoming president, in November 1979, he dressed the entire squad in Lederhosen and cardigans for a photo shoot (only Csernai put his foot down. He wore a dark suit). It was Hoffmann who started the tradition of the entire first-team squad’s visit to the Oktoberfest in fitting attire.
However, the story of those truly revolutionary months during 1978 and 1979 – months that thoroughly and permanently changed Bayern Munich – did not really end with Hoffmann’s election and the positive finish to the league season. It ended on 14 July 1979, during the summer preparations for the new campaign. On this Saturday, Bayern played a friendly against Ulm, arranged by sponsors Magirus Deutz. In his autobiography, Sepp Maier says his team won ‘7-0 or 8-0’ and that he’d had a quiet afternoon in goal. It’s not true. The game finished 1-1. But perhaps it’s no surprise that Maier got this detail wrong. Driving too fast through a thunderstorm on his way back home from Säbener Strasse to his house in Anzing, fourteen miles east of Munich, he lost control of his Mercedes and crashed into an oncoming car carrying two women. He blacked out instantly.
Both women were severely injured, suffering multiple fractures. At first it seemed as if Maier had broken some ribs and an arm and sustained a cerebral concussion but nothing life-threatening. It was only on the next day that doctors diagnosed a potentially lethal diaphragmatic tear, necessitating immediate surgery. Maier was thirty-five years old. He had played 442 consecutive league games for Bayern Munich, which probably constitutes a world record. (The British record is held by Harold Bell, who made 401 league appearances in a row for Tranmere Rovers.) He never played another one. Maier made some attempts at a comeback, but the pain wouldn’t subside. In November 1979, four months after the accident, he faced facts and announced the end of his career. That same month, Schwarzenbeck tore his Achilles tendon, which would force him to hang up his boots (and take over his aunt’s tiny newspaper and stationery shop a stone’s throw from the river Isar).
And so the decade ended with all the living legends that once were Il Grande Bayern scattered to the four winds. That is, not quite all of them. Breitner was still wearing red. And although Wilhelm Neudecker was much maligned during the chaotic last weeks of his long and fruitful presidency, it should not be forgotten that he saved one of his most important and inspired decisions until last. In February 1979, only five weeks before stepping down, Neudecker informed the public that he had finally found someone to replace Robert Schwan as the club’s business manager: Uli Hoeness, barely twenty-seven years old.
Almost thirty-five years later, Hoeness was sitting in a meeting room at Säbener Strasse, reminiscing with Rummenigge about the old days and answering questions about the new ones for a feature I was researching. He was having serious legal problems, which dominated the country’s headlines, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from the relaxed, good-natured manner in which he talked about his first days as Bayern’s business manager.
‘When I started,’ he said, ‘we were a simple football club. Things like marketing and merchandising didn’t play a role, there was very little television money. When the weather was good, people came to watch us. When the weather was bad, they stayed home. But we were totally dependent on attendances – 85 per cent of our revenue came from ticket sales. So I went to America to study gridiron and baseball, where they already made millions from merchandising.’ (Bayern studied gridiron so well that, in 1984, president Willi O. Hoffmann would suggest a fourteen-team Bundesliga without relegation, ‘modelled on the National Football League in the USA’.)
It wasn’t long after Hoeness had immersed himself in the club’s books that he found out the money problems were a lot worse than most people thought. Bayern’s annual turnover was 12 million marks (then £3.15 million). The club’s debts, meanwhile, came to seven million. About half of that sum was back taxes that would have to be paid soon.
All of which is food for an arresting thought. What if Neudecker didn’t resign on the spur of the moment because of the players’ coup? What if he preferred to be out of the line of fire when the house of cards collapsed, as it would inevitably do? And indeed, on at least one occasion Hoeness told a journalist that he suspected Neudecker had been using him as ‘cannon fodder’. He explained: ‘Neudecker sensed that everything was going down the tubes here.’ If this theory is true, Neudecker must have been surprised that the novice business manager he installed not only kept the house of cards standing – but cemented it.
We’ll never know for sure, because Neudecker died in 1993. Still, there are a few clues that suggest he wasn’t quite that deceitful. For instance, Rudi Assauer – at the time Werder Bremen’s business manager and later very successful at Schalke – always maintained that Neudecker offered him the job first. It was only when Assauer said he couldn’t commit himself before the end of the season, what with Werder in the midst of a relegation fight, that Neudecker looked elsewhere.
Also, in all likelihood the major reason he finally offered the post to Uli Hoeness was not just that the player had brokered the Magirus Deutz deal, proving his business acumen. It was also that by getting Uli, Neudecker got someone else he may have wanted even more: Uli’s younger brother Dieter. Less than a week after announcing that Uli would become Bayern’s new business manager, Neudecker signed centre-forward Dieter Hoeness from VfB Stuttgart for just 175,000 marks – to replace Gerd Müller.
Dieter was unlike his brother, both as a person and as a footballer. Paula Hoeness, their mother, once said: ‘Dieter was a lot more gifted in the fine arts. He painted and sang better than Uli.’ And while Uli was fast, agile and had a fine first touch, his brother was tall, heavy, slow and technically limited. It was easy to dismiss him as strong in the air but little else. This, coupled with the ridiculously low transfer fee, is why a lot of people think Uli brought Dieter to Bayern as an act of nepotism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Stuttgart were desperate to keep Dieter Hoeness, who held down second place in the top scorers’ table while the negotiations went on.
In fact, Dieter hesitated before signing for Bayern. As a contemporary piece in Kicker magazine pointed out: ‘The times when Bayern was the desired destination for ambitious and business-savvy players are long gone. It’s not surprising that Dieter Hoeness believes his chances of having sporting and, through that, financial success are greater in Stuttgart.’ In the end, though, Uli convinced his brother. After all, he was also Dieter’s agent and had advised him a few years earlier to have that low transfer sum, not even a tenth of his market value, written into the contract.
Both brothers were very successful in their first season together. While learning about the possibilities of merchandising and sponsoring, Uli Hoeness also continued Neudecker’s and Schwan’s tradition of organising profitable if arduous friendlies. In late October 1979, two days after a cup game and three days before a league match in Bremen, Bayern took a plane to Algiers to play against the Algerian national team. It earned the club 100,000 marks, but Hoffmann says that Csernai only agreed to the trip after Champagne Willi got him tipsy on three glasses of bubbly wine.
Dieter Hoeness, meanwhile, scored sixteen league goals. His most important probably came on the penultimate matchday and, as is so often the case in football, against his old club. Bayern were level on points and goal difference with a great Hamburg team starring Kevin Keegan. With two games left, Bayern travelled to Stuttgart, while Hamburg had a far easier away game in Leverkusen. Defender Horsmann scored twice to give Bayern a 2-0 lead, but in the dying stages the hosts pulled one back. It was only when Hoeness scored Bayern’s third with four minutes left that Bayern could be sure of an important two points. As the players came off the pitch, they heard astounding news: Hamburg had been defeated in Leverkusen. All of a sudden, Bayern were two points clear at the top of the table. A week later, the team beat Brunswick to claim the 1980 Bundesliga title, Bayern’s first in six years.
However, the key men who orchestrated this unexpected triumph were not the Hoeness brothers. Two crucial roles fell to Pál Csernai and Paul Breitner, who would meet on the evening before every game to go through the line-up and the tactics. Thus evolved what the writers dubbed the ‘PAL system’ – the catchphrase referenced the old colour encoding system for television. Csernai himself once defined it as a ‘practicable’ version of the zonal defence Gyula Lóránt had introduced with mixed results. It was Breitner, as the undisputed team leader and midfield conductor, who brought the system to life on the pitch, where he struck up an almost telepathic partnership with Karl-Heinz Rummenigge.
The 1979–80 season was Rummenigge’s breakthrough campaign. A year after being regularly criticised for wasting too many chances, the 24-year-old won the Bundesliga’s top scorer trophy for the first time, with twenty-six goals. Six months later, he would also be voted European Footballer of the Year 1980, collecting more than three times as many votes as the men in second and third place, Bernd Schuster and Michel Platini. Soon, the press would coin the term Breitnigge to describe the unstoppable juggernaut that was Breitner and Rummenigge.
But there was another thing besides tactics and individual class. It was something that had been absent from the club for some time – harmony. Breitner was at pains to explain how the egotism and the infighting that used to characterise the team of the 1970s had evaporated. ‘Back then it was dog-eat-dog and it only worked because the success was always there,’ he said. ‘But the friction killed the harmony.’ Rummenigge echoed these sentiments, telling author Dieter Ueberjahn how as a young man he had often thought about leaving the club, because the established players cold-shouldered him for a long time. ‘I felt hard done by,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t so naive as to think they would all welcome me with open arms, but it came as a shock to me when I realised it was only the craving for success and profit which kept those stars together.’ According to Breitner, this had changed. He explained: ‘Now we’re vigilant about preventing egotistic and cliquish thinking.’
Whatever it was that propelled the new Bayern, it worked during the following season as well, though Hamburg were again a formidable opponent. The club had lost Keegan but gained an old acquaintance – Franz Beckenbauer. The Kaiser joined Hamburg during the winter break after three years in New York and for the first few months it seemed as if his return would be a triumphant one. In mid-March 1981, Hamburg were in first place, three points ahead of Bayern, when they hosted the Reds for a potential make-or-break match. ‘This is the first time all season that we go into a game as absolute underdogs,’ Hoeness said on television. ‘It’s a new situation for our players, and I think they are looking forward to proving all those people wrong who think the title race will be decided on Saturday.’
But Felix Magath gave Hamburg the lead, then Breitner, of all people, played a disastrous back-pass that gifted Horst Hrubesch another goal nine minutes into the second half: 2-0. Was this too deep a hole Bayern had dug for themselves? No. Because there was still Breitnigge. On sixty-seven minutes, Breitner won possession deep in his own half, went past three opponents and played a brilliant through ball into the path of Rummenigge, who scored from just inside the box. And with only seconds left on the clock, Dieter Hoeness outjumped two defenders and nodded the ball to Breitner, who fired home a first-time shot from close range.
Uli Hoeness had been right – and wrong. Because in its own way, this game did decide the title race. Somehow Hamburg couldn’t mentally cope with having come so close to going a massive five points clear at the top. A week after the draw with Bayern, they suffered a heavy 6-2 defeat in Dortmund, then they were beaten at Schalke. When Beckenbauer’s new team also lost to Stuttgart in mid-May, Bayern were, to all intents and purposes, home and dry. They claimed their second league title in as many years with a game in hand and four points ahead of Hamburg.
On the last matchday, the Bayern players arrived at the Olympic Stadium in Lederhosen, while a brass band played Bavarian folk songs, costumed groups wearing Tracht paraded across the pitch and whip-crackers showed off their traditional art. Hoffmann loved it all so much, he threw his hat into the crowd.
Numerous times during the game against already relegated Bayer Uerdingen, ecstatic fans ran onto the pitch. When Bayern made it 4-0 with only two minutes left, the crowd could be held back no longer. Thousands invaded the pitch and play was halted for more than ten minutes. Finally, the stadium announcer informed the supporters that if the game had to be abandoned, Rummenigge would be stripped of the two goals he’d scored and might not be able to defend his title as the league’s top scorer. The fans left the pitch, positioned themselves on the running track, waited for two minutes and then, when the final whistle rang, invaded the field of play all over again.
The title was particularly sweet because it seemed as if Bayern had finally found a proper rival, the Barcelona to their Real, the Celtic to their Rangers, the Liverpool to their Manchester United. Hamburg were a tradition-laden club from a big, rich city. Like Bayern, their business manager was a former star player (Günter Netzer). And, like Bayern, they would soon have a foreign coach who was going to bring tactical novelties to the league (the great Austrian Ernst Happel, who pioneered the pressing game). But although Hamburg always finished in first or second place between 1979 and 1984, they could not sustain that success and would gradually fade away, to be replaced by a Bayern challenger every bit as unlikely as Gladbach had been in the 1970s.
What Hamburg did, though, was succeed in Europe. In 1983, Happel guided the team to an unexpected triumph in the European Cup over a star-studded Juventus side. For Bayern fans, this was deeply ironic. In the 1970s, the Reds often struggled in the league but excelled repeatedly in Europe, while their greatest domestic rivals were doing fine in the Bundesliga but found themselves dogged by bad luck under midweek floodlights. In the 1980s, it would be the other way round. Few events illustrate this better than those of May 1982.
On the first day of that month, Bayern met Nuremberg in one of the most memorable DFB-Pokal finals of all time. After barely a dozen minutes, Dieter Hoeness went up for an aerial duel with Nuremberg’s Alois Reinhardt and sustained a bad cut. Like England defender Terry Butcher in a World Cup qualifier seven years later, Hoeness had his head-wound first covered with a bandage and then stitched up during the interval. Like Butcher, he would forever be associated with battling on despite the bleeding injury. Hoeness briefly considered coming off, but his brother pleaded with him to stay on. Bayern were not only trailing 2-0 but had also lost defender Bertram Beierlorzer, who’d torn his Achilles tendon only ten minutes after the Hoeness–Reinhardt incident, which is why Csernai was reluctant to make another substitution so early.
Eight minutes into the second half, a Wolfgang Dremmler cross from the right found Hoeness at the far edge of the six-yard box. Hoeness smartly headed the ball over to Rummenigge, who pulled one back for Bayern. Nuremberg were now coming apart at the seams, it seemed, while Bayern surged forward. But that left a lot of space for the opposition to exploit. On the hour, Nuremberg’s Werner Dressel played a through-ball that bisected the Bayern backline, his teammate Herbert Heidenreich received the ball near the penalty spot and shot on the turn – only to see Dremmler throw himself into the path of the ball and deflect it against the left-hand post.
Five minutes later, Rummenigge hit the woodwork at the other end, but Wolfgang Kraus was there to put the rebound away and make it 2-2. Hoeness now became a pivotal figure in Bayern’s attack, as Rummenigge and Breitner regularly used him as a partner for one-twos that split Nuremberg’s defence. Of course he also made his main strength count: his bandaged head knocked the ball into the path of Kraus, who went down under a challenge from Peter Stocker to win a soft penalty. Breitner converted the spot-kick to put his side ahead after seventy-two minutes.
It was left to the man of the match to put the finishing touch on this classic cup final. With a minute to go, Breitner sent in a cross from the left and Hoeness headed home from seven yards for the final scoreline of 4-2. The sight of Hoeness with his blood-stained bandage, immortalised in print as his Turban, became one of the most iconic images of 1980s German football.
If you count the 1974 European Cup (which went to a replay) and the two-legged 1976 Intercontinental Cup as two finals, then the Nuremberg game had been the twelfth final in Bayern’s history. All had been won. And just twenty-six days later, the team hoped to keep this streak alive when they prepared for big game number thirteen – the European Cup final in Rotterdam.
On a very warm Wednesday evening, the Reds faced English champions Aston Villa. In the previous season, Bayern had been knocked out by Liverpool on away goals in the semis, prompting a defiant Breitner to declare: ‘We’re the best team in Europe regardless. And we’ll prove it.’ Now, thirteen months later, here was their chance to do so. Brian Moore, covering the game for ITV, called Bayern ‘the odds-on favourites, based no doubt on their greater experience in playing European football’. The odds became even better ten minutes into the match, when Villa’s veteran goalkeeper Jimmy Rimmer came off with shoulder problems and was replaced by 23-year-old Nigel Spink, who’d made only one first-team appearance for the club.
And yet the English looked more comfortable during the first half-hour and dominated the match. Until Breitnigge got going. On thirty-one minutes, Breitner set up Rummenigge, who forced a fine save from Spink before the follow-up from young Reinhold Mathy was blocked by a defender ten yards in front of an open goal. Thirty seconds later, Breitner crossed from the right and Rummenigge narrowly missed the target with a marvellous bicycle kick. It would turn out to be the blueprint for the rest of the night.
Looking back on the game, a philosophical Augenthaler says: ‘What could go wrong, did go wrong. We were clearly the better team but wasted five or six excellent opportunities. They had two chances all night and scored. We kept moving forward, but that’s football.’
On fifty-seven minutes, Augenthaler, who was having a fine night, embarked on a glorious sixty-yard run that took him past five Villa players, yet his shot from inside the box went wide. Then a Rummenigge flick-on sent Hoeness clear through on goal, but the linesman raised his flag to signal offside, perhaps erroneously. Another minute later, Spink denied Dürnberger. Now Augenthaler had another chance, but his header was nodded off the line by Kenny Swain. Then Hoeness failed to make contact with not one but two crosses right in front of goal in the span of only seventy seconds.
‘But Villa still hanging on at nil-nil,’ Brian Moore said after sixty-six minutes, sounding ever so slightly incredulous. Moments later, left-winger Tony Morley ran into Bayern’s box with the ball at his feet, taking on sweeper Hans Weiner. Augenthaler, who was marking Peter Withe in front of goal, moved over to back up his teammate. In Pál Csernai’s ‘PAL system’, somebody now had to take up Augenthaler’s position and look after Withe. But nobody did. Morley delivered a low cross from the left and, from close range, an unmarked Withe prodded in by way of the post.
Just to prove what kind of night it was, Hoeness finally managed to put the ball into the back of Villa’s net with two minutes left, only to see the goal (correctly) disallowed for offside. When the French referee Georges Konrath blew his whistle for the last time on this day, the side Breitner had called the best in Europe had become the first Bayern team in history to lose a final. Even the presence of Franz Roth, who had travelled to Holland hoping he would be the team’s good-luck charm, hadn’t prevented the spell from breaking.
While the squad quietly drove back to their hotel in Scheveningen, half an hour north of Rotterdam, Augenthaler and Dürnberger were still sitting in a caravan at the ground. The two had been randomly chosen for the mandatory post-match drug test but found it hard to deliver urine samples. ‘The two Villa players came in, downed a crate of beer extremely fast and were gone again after twenty minutes,’ Augenthaler recalls, ‘but we were there for ever.’ When he and Dürnberger finally arrived at the hotel, most of their teammates were drunk. A few chairs were hurled in frustration from the balcony, then everyone went to bed, knowing very well there was no sleep to be had.
The level of disappointment may be best gauged by what happened the next morning. Despite the defeat, the team was received by the mayor of Munich and various dignitaries. It was only during lunch that the players realised their coach was missing. Csernai had gone home directly from the airport. An angry Breitner said: ‘Somebody who should be here isn’t. If we lose, we lose together. A bit more decency would have been in order.’ The coach apologised, blaming it on his ‘frazzled nerves’ and, unconvincingly, on a car that refused to start. This morning, more so than the previous night’s game, marked the beginning of the Hungarian’s end at Bayern. It had taken only two years for the harmony to fray.
One man who never shied away from a microphone or refused to answer a reporter’s question said astonishingly little in the wake of the Rotterdam drama. There was probably a very good reason why Uli Hoeness restrained himself from criticising the team or the coach. Only three months before the final, he had learned that some things are more important than winning or losing a football match.
On 17 February 1982, Hoeness was going from Munich to Hannover, to watch Breitner and Rummenigge play in a friendly for West Germany against Portugal. He was travelling in a light aircraft – a six-seater Piper Seneca. The only other passenger, apart from the two pilots, was a good friend of his, a publisher. Somewhere over Nuremberg, Hoeness dozed off. Luckily for him, his seatbelt wasn’t fastened. Because something went wrong during the plane’s landing approach. The Piper Seneca brushed a few trees, crashed and broke in half. Upon impact, Hoeness was hurled out of the plane. The other three men died in their seats.
When the West Germany game ended, Rummenigge and Breitner were told what had happened. They immediately hurried over to the hospital, wearing their tracksuits. Hoeness was unconscious. The doctors feared for his life until the early hours of the morning. Then they told Rummenigge and Breitner that he wasn’t as severely injured as they had first feared and would be fine. Still, Breitner refused to leave. He spent the night at the bedside, together with Uli’s wife Susi.
At five o’clock, Hoeness woke up. He looked at Breitner and said: ‘What was the final score?’