Very few German football fans would recognise Udo Scholz, now in his mid-seventies, if they met him in the streets. That’s because his voice was more famous than his face. Between 1973 and 1994, Scholz was the stadium announcer at the most notorious Bundesliga ground, Kaiserslautern’s Betzenberg stadium.
Visiting teams feared the Betzenberg, because at the time it was one of the few football-only grounds (another famous one was Dortmund’s Westfalenstadion), which meant the fans were really close to the action. And these were passionate, not to say unruly fans. It’s probably no coincidence that the first-ever Bundesliga match abandoned because of crowd trouble was staged at the Betzenberg. In November 1976, during Scholz’s fourth season in Kaiserslautern, the game against Düsseldorf was terminated in the seventy-sixth minute after bottles were thrown from the stands and the referee felt threatened by the crowd.
Bayern found the Betzenberg particularly tough. We have already mentioned the Reds’ legendary 7-4 defeat in 1973. That was almost par for the course. Between 1975 and 1983, Bayern couldn’t win a single game in Kaiserslautern. It was so frustrating that after a 2-1 loss in March 1982, Paul Breitner famously said: ‘Maybe it’s best if we stay home and just send them the points by mail.’ But the following year, business manager Uli Hoeness came up with a novel idea to end the curse – he dressed the team not in their customary red or white but in what came to be known as the ‘Brazilian kit’: yellow shirts, blue shorts and white socks. Footballers being deeply superstitious beings, Kaiserslautern countered this ploy by playing in their green away kit. But the Hoeness mojo worked better. The home side wasted a penalty (about which more later), then Augenthaler scored the only goal of the game with a deflected free kick on the hour.
It’s tempting to imagine Udo Scholz sang the song that would soon become famous for the very first time on this day. The idea for the song had come to him while on holidays in Murnau, a picturesque market town in southern Bavaria. One day, Scholz went to a country inn nestled deep in the forest. Late in the evening, a group of young men walked into the restaurant. They wore Lederhosen, but one of them had badly torn his. Scholz says that somebody yelled: ‘Pull off that boy’s Lederhosen!’ For some reason, that phrase stuck in his mind. On the way back to his hotel, the car radio played the Beatles ditty ‘Yellow Submarine’ – and Scholz put two and two together.
A few weeks later, Bayern travelled to Kaiserslautern. As the visiting players came out to warm up, Scholz began to sing ‘Zieht den Bayern die Lederhosen aus’ – pull off Bayern’s Lederhosen – to the tune of ‘Yellow Submarine’ over the tannoy. The fans immediately picked it up and a new terrace anthem was born.
Scholz says all this took place ‘in the early 1980s’. But that can’t be right; it must have happened earlier. Because in 1980, a jack of all trades from Berlin by the name of Heinz Werner Schneider put out a single. One of his trades was running the bohemian hipsters’ pub Hundekehle, meaning dog throat, so he used his nickname Heinz die Hundekehle for the record. It was the year Franz Josef Strauss, the arch-conservative prime minister of Bavaria, ran for chancellor, which West Germany’s art scene saw as a threat to liberalism. Thus the record was a thinly-veiled satirical dig at the proud Bavarian Strauss. It was entitled: ‘Zieht den Bayern die Lederhosen aus (Yellow Submarine)’.
When I stumbled over this obscure record, I suspected that Scholz might have heard it – instead of the old Beatles tune – on the radio and simply adopted it. However, then I tracked down Gregor Rottschalk, a Berlin radio legend and the man who produced the single. ‘We went to see Hertha play Bayern,’ he told me. ‘And when the crowd started to sing this Lederhosen song, we said: Hold on, this is funny, maybe we should do something with it.’ In other words, when Rottschalk penned some additional lyrics and then produced his anti-Strauss single in the summer of 1980, ‘Zieht den Bayern die Lederhosen aus’ had already reached Berlin, so it must predate ‘the early 1980s’.
Whenever it came into being precisely, ‘Zieht den Bayern die Lederhosen aus’ spread like wildfire, became the most fervently struck-up football chant in the league and is probably still the first song any non-Bayern fan learns. It became enormously popular because the Reds dominated the 1980s so thoroughly that ‘Anyone But Bayern’ was the dictum of choice for most German football fans.
One reason for the club’s domestic pre-eminence was that the Reds finally solved their goalkeeping problems. When Sepp Maier had to hang up his gloves, Bayern’s number-one shirt went to a young, Hamburg-born goalkeeper by the name of Walter Junghans. He did well in his first season (making Kicker magazine’s Team of the Year), but then he became as inconsistent as his stand-in, the veteran Manfred Müller.
Junghans made his last appearance for the club in one of the classic 1980s Bundesliga thrillers: the home match against Hamburg on 24 April 1982. The visitors scored three goals in the final twenty minutes to win the game 4-3 and settle the title race. It was Hamburg’s number one, future West German international Uli Stein, who committed the worst goalkeeping gaffe of the game, while Junghans made no glaring mistakes. However, he seemed insecure throughout the match and most people felt a truly great keeper would have saved at least one, maybe two of the goals.
In early June, Uli Hoeness announced he’d reached an agreement with the Belgian club K.S.K. Beveren and would sign their 28-year-old goalkeeper Jean-Marie Pfaff for 800,000 marks (£190,000 at the time). Pfaff promptly conceded one of the craziest goals in league history in his very first game – away at Werder Bremen in August 1982.
Bayern dominated this match, but Bremen’s excellent goalkeeper Dieter Burdenski denied them again and again. And so the game was still scoreless when, with a minute left in the first half, Werder won a throw-in deep in Bayern’s half, only a few yards away from the corner flag on the left flank. Bremen’s right-winger Uwe Reinders came running over – long throw-ins were his speciality. Even if you hadn’t known this, it would have immediately become obvious from the way Reinders held the ball in only one hand and then walked back a few steps to take a short run-up.
As the ball sailed toward the near post, where Bremen’s midfielder Rigobert Gruber was waiting for it, Pfaff left his line. However, he couldn’t quite get to the throw-in, because Gruber was blocking his path and his view. The ball flew above the heads of friend and foe, but Pfaff probably didn’t see this. All he saw was that the ball was suddenly above him and on its way into the goal. He desperately stabbed at it with his right hand. Although he made contact he couldn’t stop the ball from crossing the line.
It was the only goal of the game. And of course it wouldn’t have counted if Pfaff hadn’t touched the ball, because you can’t score directly from a throw-in. As the players sat in the dressing room after the final whistle, Csernai went through the roof. ‘This is ridiculous,’ he yelled so loudly that his words echoed down the hallway where the journalists were waiting, notepads at the ready. ‘This is the worst goal we have conceded in three years!’ And turning towards Pfaff, he hissed: ‘You’re no longer in Belgium!’
When I met Pfaff at a football gala in Düsseldorf in the summer of 2015, he said matter-of-factly his reaction to the goal had been a simple one: ‘I realised that I had to work even harder and train even more now that I was in the Bundesliga.’ In Belgium, Pfaff had been a semi-pro, because Beveren were a small club. He held down a regular eight-hour job at a bank and only trained in the afternoon. Of course all this had to change at Bayern and it did. Pfaff eventually became not only a firm fan favourite but was also recognised as one of the best goalkeepers in the world. It was Pfaff who saved the penalty in Kaiserslautern in late 1983, diving to his left and denying Andreas Brehme, which lifted Bayern’s Betzenberg curse.
After that game, Pfaff himself explained his excellent performance with reference to the fact that he now had his own official goalkeeping coach – Sepp Maier. The Bayern legend’s return to Säbener Strasse marked a watershed in the relationship between the club and its former players.
Hoeness certainly played an important role in this transformation. He would also begin to order Bayern’s stationery not from a wholesaler but from a tiny, cramped store in Ohlmüllerstrasse, just a brisk walk from the public field at Schyrenstrasse where Bayern had played their first-ever game. The store was as nondescript as the street. A simple sign told you the owner was called Nitzinger. This was the name of Georg Schwarzenbeck’s aunt Maria, who’d run the store until she felt too old to do the job. Now the man they all called Katsche stood behind the counter for eleven hours every weekday. When you asked him why he wasn’t working for Bayern, he replied: ‘I like to be my own boss.’ He would talk about football if you prodded him in a polite way, but he preferred not to. ‘Why don’t you ask some of the others?’ he’d say sooner or later. ‘They’re much better talkers.’ (Schwarzenbeck closed the shop in 2008, blaming the Internet and big chain-stores for dwindling business. He continued to supply Bayern Munich, though.)
However, it wasn’t Hoeness who had the idea of bringing Maier back. It was Jean-Marie Pfaff. ‘Shortly after I joined Bayern in 1982,’ he says, ‘I asked the club to sign him as a goalkeeping coach. But back then they didn’t want him. So for almost two years I drove to his place in Anzing two or three times a week to work out with him.’ The reason the club didn’t want Maier in 1982–83 had a name. After Pfaff won the game in Kaiserslautern almost by himself, Maier told a reporter: ‘Jean-Marie is just as fanatical on the training pitch as I used to be. I would have loved to take him under my wing earlier, but at that time there was still one Mister Csernai at the club.’
That even the man who had brought down a president to save Csernai’s job now uttered his name with something approaching contempt underlines how isolated the Hungarian had become at the club in the wake of the Rotterdam final. His time at Bayern was up in May 1983, shortly before the end of the season. Csernai struck just too many people as aloof and arrogant. The powerful Herbert Jackisch, CEO of Magirus Deutz and a member of Bayern’s board of directors, had demanded the sacking of the coach for months. When Jackisch began to link Csernai’s fate with that of Willi O. Hoffmann, publicly announcing he would prefer a return of former president Wilhelm Neudecker, Hoffmann had to act. He dismissed Csernai with three games left in the season, promoted his assistant on an interim basis and announced that a man would return in the summer whose name had been chanted by the fans at the Olympic Stadium increasingly often during the previous weeks: Udo Lattek.
Lattek was not a natural man-manager like Čik Čajkovski, not a radical if troubled genius like Branko Zebec, not a cerebral strategist like Dettmar Cramer, not a sophisticated tactician like Pál Csernai. As Der Spiegel put it in an obituary when Lattek died in February 2015: ‘He always left being visionary to others. He was convinced you don’t win trophies by imposing what you think is best on a team. You win by getting the best out of what is there in the team. If you will, this was the Prussian element in him.’
In other words, Lattek was the ultimate pragmatist. But of course that’s not a bad thing. When he joined Bayern for the second time, he was, at only forty-eight, the most successful club coach in the world. During the eight years he’d been away, Lattek won the UEFA Cup with Gladbach and the Cup Winners’ Cup with Barcelona. The only other manager who has managed to lift all three European trophies is Giovanni Trapattoni. But only Lattek pulled off this feat with three different teams, not to mention in two different countries. Bayern signed him to win, and win he did. In the four years of his second stint at the club he guided the Reds to three league titles and two domestic cups, while also coming very close to bringing the coveted European Cup back to Munich.
And so, in the summer of 1983, it was almost like the good old days again at Bayern: Hoeness in charge, Lattek on the bench, Maier cracking jokes at the training ground. It could have been even better – Breitner could have been on the pitch. But the 32-year-old midfield dynamo retired in the summer, after a difficult, injury-strewn season. His testimonial, which pitted Bayern against a World XI starring Zico and Mario Kempes, was a great spectacle. When Bayern took the lead in the twenty-seventh minute, the stadium announcer said the goal had been scored by Breitner, which raised a great cheer from the Olympic Stadium crowd. But it wasn’t true. Franz Beckenbauer, playing for the World XI, had tried to clear the ball, but ended up putting it into his own net. This was, it has to be said, a bit of a speciality of his. After all, Beckenbauer had done the very same thing in his own testimonial the previous summer.
Lattek’s first season back at the helm brought a lot of commotion on and off the pitch. It produced two of the most notorious transfers in league history and two of the most famous football matches. In a way, one of these big deals and one of those unforgettable games were even connected.
In mid-March 1984, while the club were in the midst of an unusually tight title race (only three points separated the top five teams), Bayern held a spectacular press conference. Facing hundreds of journalists, countless photographers’ flashbulbs and even television cameras were, from right to left, Bayern treasurer Fritz Scherer, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, Udo Lattek, Willi O. Hoffmann, Archimede Pitrolo and Gianni Sartori. The latter two gentlemen came from Milan and represented Italian giants Internazionale. Like everyone else at the table, they rarely smiled but listened earnestly while Hoffmann explained the deal to the assembled media. Rummenigge would become an Inter player on 1 July, the Bayern president said. The transfer sum was 10 million marks (then £2.6 million) plus all the revenue from a friendly between the two clubs to be staged in August. (Which is why the move eventually netted Bayern between 11 and 12 million marks.)
It was a breathtaking deal in every regard. Rummenigge was now the most expensive footballer in the world. Yes, he was great. Yes, British pop duo Alan & Denise had just immortalised his ‘sexy knees’ in song. But he was twenty-eight years old and there were concerns his best years might be behind him. As Hoeness once quipped: ‘For that kind of money, we should have carried him to Italy in a palanquin.’ (A couple of months later, Napoli pulverised this transfer record by paying a seemingly absurd £6.9 million for a 23-year-old Diego Maradona. All things considered, Napoli made the smarter deal.)
At one point during the press conference, Rummenigge said: ‘What bothers me is that all everybody is talking about here is money.’ That, however, was to be expected. Rummenigge probably felt as if he had been thrust under a magnifying glass for costing so much money and earning a big wage. But it wasn’t really about him. As the noted writer Jürgen Leinemann said in a contemporary piece: ‘Nobody envies him his money. He is modest, friendly, nice, dependable.’ Rather, people wondered what Bayern would do with all this sudden income. No Bundesliga club had ever spent as much as 2.5 million marks on a player and now the Reds had pocketed at least four times this amount. In one fell swoop, the club’s financial problems were solved – the debts had been erased and there was money to spend. Kicker headlined: ‘Bayern’s Millions Drive the Bundesliga Crazy’.
Exactly six weeks after the press conference, Bayern began investing the Italian money. Even though his contract stipulated that he had to inform his club about any journey exceeding 125 miles, a young Gladbach midfielder by the name of Lothar Matthäus furtively flew to Munich, took a medical supervised by Bayern’s club doctor Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt and then signed a three-year contract. Annoyed, Gladbach’s business manager Helmut Grashoff said: ‘It looks like our rules no longer apply to Lothar.’
The slightly surprising thing about the transfer was not so much that Bayern wanted Matthäus. Even though it would be a long time before he became the superstar we remember him as, he was certainly one of the most promising midfielders in the league. No, it was surprising that Matthäus wanted to play for Bayern. The young man was born in Herzogenaurach, the small Franconian town almost literally torn in half by the fierce rivalry between the original Dassler brothers, Adi and Rudolf, and their respective companies, Adidas and Puma. In Herzogenaurach, you are either an Adidas man or a Puma man, there is no middle ground. Matthäus’s father Heinz was a Puma man, employed as a janitor. His mother Katharina did sewing work for the company from home. His first club, FC Herzogenaurach, was almost a factory team. (Adidas men would never play for FC. They used to run out for the town’s other club, ASV Herzogenaurach.) A few years ago, Matthäus told 11Freunde magazine that this was why he joined Gladbach in 1979: ‘My dad worked for Puma. Puma was Gladbach’s supplier. So Borussia was my club. Bayern were Adidas, meaning I wasn’t interested in them.’
Five years later, though, ambition won the upper hand over principles and Matthäus joined Bayern for 2.6 million marks (but, needless to say, continued to wear Puma boots). While the player’s impending transfer dominated the headlines, Bayern travelled to Gelsenkirchen, the industrial city in the western part of the country that is home to Schalke. The club, then in the second division, was about to host Bayern in a DFB-Pokal semi-final, the likes of which nobody had ever seen.
After only 130 seconds, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge put the overwhelming favourites ahead from seven yards. Barely nine minutes later, the 22-year-old Reinhold Mathy made it 2-0. (Mathy, now at best a faint memory, was considered one of the most promising German talents at the time but soon saw his career falter.) Schalke pulled one back within fifty seconds when Rummenigge’s younger brother Michael, signed by Bayern a few years earlier, lost the man he was supposed to mark.
Then Schalke’s local hero Olaf Thon made his presence felt. Thon would later win three league titles with Bayern and the World Cup with West Germany, but this cup game, staged one day after his eighteenth birthday, would forever be remembered as his greatest, or at least his defining, night. On nineteen minutes, Thon started a move near his own penalty area that he finished with a low strike at the other end, tying the game. Schalke’s spacious and inhospitable Parkstadion ground was now a madhouse and not even the fact that Michael Rummenigge restored Bayern’s lead with a great volley only fifty seconds later could dampen the electric atmosphere; this was now a highly dramatic cup game and up for grabs.
Bayern’s left-sided midfielder Hans Pflügler forced a fine save from Schalke’s goalkeeper, none other than former Red Walter Junghans. Then Täuber hit the post. Thon, who stood just five foot seven inches, tied the game on the hour with a header, towering high above the Dane Søren Lerby, who had been signed from Ajax for a lot of money to replace Breitner but was struggling to find his footing. Ten minutes later, another cross sailed into Bayern’s box and again the only player who went up for it wore a Schalke shirt. His name was Peter Stichler and his header gave the hosts the lead for the first time in what was already an epic game.
Bayern sent on another striker, Dieter Hoeness. In the subtle but steady Gelsenkirchen downpour, the Munich giants now threw everything forward. Ten minutes from time, Michael Rummenigge found the target with a flying header after a defender had mistimed Lerby’s cross: 4-4. Extra time. For a bit over twenty minutes, the match almost resembled a normal game. But as it turned out, it was only charging up its batteries for eight minutes of sheer craziness.
In the 112th minute, Junghans let a harmless ball slip out of his grasp, demonstrating why Bayern had let him go, and Hoeness nudged it across the line from a yard out. The television commentator said: ‘This game has been decided.’ Four minutes later, Schalke’s veteran sweeper Bernard Dietz made it 5-5 with a first-time shot from a corner. Ninety seconds after Dietz’s goal, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge spotted an unmarked Hoeness and played a lethal vertical pass. Hoeness was clear through on goal and coolly put the ball between Junghans’s legs for the eleventh goal of the night. The television commentator said: ‘Is this the deciding goal? It is. It must be.’
Two minutes and two seconds into stoppage time, the referee blew his whistle. But not, as some people thought, to end the game. Instead, he awarded Schalke a free kick twenty-five yards in front of goal. Thon shaped as if to shoot but stepped over the ball and ran into the box. Instead, Bernd Dierssen struck the ball. It hit various legs and thighs in the goalmouth, then Augenthaler headed it to his right – and straight into Thon’s path. The kid smashed the ball into the far corner with a fantastic left-footed volley: 6-6. Replay.
Interviewed amidst ecstatic supporters, Thon stunned the nation – and, one assumes, shocked Schalke’s fans – after the game by admitting that he was a Bayern fan and actually slept in Bayern bedding. (Which also tells you that Uli Hoeness had begun to implement a few merchandising ideas.)
This second game, the replay, has been overshadowed by the unbelievable 6-6 draw, but it was amazing in its own right. Bayern gave away a two-goal lead and Pfaff had to make a brilliant save to deny Thon, before Karl-Heinz Rummenigge scored the winner with a flying header, sending his team into the final. Against – how could it have been any different? – Borussia Mönchengladbach and Matthäus.
The game between the grand old rivals of the previous decade has gone down in history as one of the most memorable finals in this competition. Although it was a good, entertaining match, the game’s fame is basically down to one single moment. Gladbach, coached by their former striker Jupp Heynckes, took the lead through Frank Mill and although Bayern created a whole slew of chances, the Reds had to wait until the eighty-third minute before the equaliser finally came: Mathy hit the post from close range and Wolfgang Dremmler rifled the rebound home from a tight angle. For the first time, a DFB-Pokal final went to penalties.
The first man up was, inevitably, Lothar Matthäus. Pfaff had a well-earned reputation as what Germans call an Elfmetertöter, literally a penalty killer. (In fact, the Belgian saved 64 per cent of the spot-kicks he faced in the Bundesliga, the best ratio in league history.) Perhaps that’s why Matthäus tried to place his kick particularly carefully, aiming for the top right-hand corner. In a way, it was a good decision, because Pfaff guessed right, dived to his left and would’ve probably saved a low shot. In another way, it was a bad decision. The shot cleared the crossbar.
If you ask any Gladbach fan about this moment, chances are he or she will tell you that Matthäus intentionally missed his penalty. It’s nonsense, of course, but the miss garnered him the unfortunate nickname ‘Judas’ in Gladbach and had many people wondering why Heynckes sent him out to take a penalty in the first place. The answer is simple: Matthäus was a good penalty-taker. He’d scored a number of goals for Borussia from the spot and felt comfortable. And there is another thing – there were many more penalties to come.
After the game, Matthäus was photographed sitting on the pitch and sobbing uncontrollably. It’s another iconic image emblematic of 1980s football and maybe that’s why many people assume that his penalty decided the match. It didn’t. Four minutes after his miss, Augenthaler tried the old trick of hammering the ball into the middle of the goal. But Gladbach’s goalkeeper Uli Sude wouldn’t be duped and easily parried the shot. (Matthäus ran over to Sude in his socks and embraced the goalkeeper.) It was 4-4 in the shoot-out after the first round of penalties. While Matthäus told a reporter ‘Missing this penalty is the biggest disappointment of my career,’ the drama went on.
With the score 7-7, Gladbach’s striker Frank Mill was supposed to step up, but he told Heynckes he wasn’t feeling well. (Nobody knew it at the time, but Mill had sustained a concussion in an aerial duel with Dieter Hoeness.) And so substitute Norbert Ringels placed the ball on the white spot, took a long run-up – and made the left-hand post quiver. Pfaff triumphantly raised his arms, while Dieter Hoeness went looking for the ball, because it was his turn now. The reason he couldn’t find it was that young Michael Rummenigge had grabbed the ball and was briskly walking towards the penalty spot. The twenty-year-old watched Sude dive to his left and coolly knocked the ball into the opposite corner. Before the ball had hit the back of the net, Rummenigge had turned and was racing towards his brother to celebrate. Karl-Heinz was the first player to face the cameras and talk about the game. ‘My brother has made me the best possible present,’ he said. Then he left the pitch – and the club.