Klaus Augenthaler has spent twenty-two years at Bayern Munich. He was a youth-team player, then a reserve-team player, then a first-team player, then a youth-team coach and a reserve-team player again, then a first-team assistant coach and even, briefly, the first-team interim coach.
When you see him for the first time now, at fifty-eight years of age, you can’t help but think that it tells. His hair is prematurely grey, his face is furrowed with deep wrinkles, his skin looks leathery. But sometimes there’s a sparkle in his deep-set eyes that signals mischief and tells you he’s nowhere near as gruff as he appears.
In fact, Augenthaler was behind one of the greatest football spoofs ever. On 29 March 1999, he held a surprise press conference. At the time, he was coaching Grazer AK, the tradition-laden Austrian club from Graz. His team were in third place and it was the day before their derby against Sturm Graz, so the assembled press pack was stunned when Augenthaler said he was going to resign with immediate effect. They were even more surprised when club president Peter Svetits then presented a totally unknown Lithuanian coach called Albertas Klimaviszys as the new man in charge.
The reason he was unknown was that he was a fake. In reality, he was a German comedian who was filming the entire, elaborate hoax for his new television show. Both he and Augenthaler were so deadpan, and stuck to their roles so stubbornly, that Austrian radio broke news of Augenthaler’s resignation and the comedian even held a training session before the prank was explained.
And so it’s fun to hear Augenthaler reminisce about all those years at Säbener Strasse. When he talks about his time as Giovanni Trapattoni’s assistant, he says everyone understood the coach very well and that all this talk about not being able to follow the Italian’s explanations was just a welcome excuse for some players. He says he retired even though he still had a year to run on his contract, because there were too many factions and cliques in the early 1990s team, people whispering behind his back that he’d become too slow. He says the team of the 1980s was able to cope with all the pressure and withstand the nation’s antipathy (resulting in part from his foul on Rudi Völler), because the team-spirit and the camaraderie was unparalleled.
Finally, I ask: ‘Well, how did you end up at Bayern in the first place?’
‘The club I was playing for, FC Vilshofen, had a really good youth set-up,’ Augenthaler replies. (Vilshofen is a Bavarian town 110 miles northeast of Munich.) ‘When I was seventeen, we won the league and beat Bayern home and away. Because of that, four players from our small club were invited to Munich for a trial. So we went there in the summer. The trial lasted three days. Let me tell you, it was tough. I was knackered. But two of us were asked to join the club, Fred Arbinger and me.’
‘So that was a trial with Bayern’s Under-19s in July of 1975?’ I repeat, taking notes.
‘No,’ Augenthaler says. ‘A trial with the first team.’
For a moment, I’m speechless. Then I say: ‘You mean they invite four seventeen-year-old kids from near the Czech border to Munich and then have them train with the Bundesliga side, the Beckenbauers and Müllers?’
‘Yes,’ Augenthaler says matter-of-factly. ‘I think some of the big stars were still on holiday, because they had won the European Cup. But we trained with Bundesliga players I had only ever seen on television.’
While I scribble down a reminder along the lines of ‘At Bayern, it’s always sink or swim’, Augenthaler corrects himself and mentions that he’d seen some of the players in the flesh before.
‘I was at the European Cup final in 1974,’ he says.
Now I’m speechless for more than just a moment. At last, I ask: ‘In Brussels? You were at the final in Brussels? For the first game or for the replay?’
‘For the first game,’ Augenthaler says. ‘I wasn’t a Bayern fan at the time. I had a soft spot for Dortmund, because my best friend supported them. But of course there was a group of Bayern fans in Vilshofen. They chartered a coach to get to Brussels and offered people a ride. Well, I jumped at the chance. I was sixteen and thought I might never get to see such a big game again.’ Chuckling, he adds: ‘I can still tell you the price: 35 marks per person.’
I put down my pen. ‘You know, this is amazing!’ I exclaim. ‘This is so great for the book I’m writing. Here’s one of the true Bayern icons – and it turns out he was in Brussels and saw the very goal that more or less made the club a superpower, Schwarzenbeck’s legendary piledriver. Fantastic!’
‘I wish I had,’ Augenthaler says slowly. ‘Five minutes before the end of extra time, we left the ground to beat the traffic. None of us saw that goal.’