Franz Beckenbauer obit

Franz Beckenbauer, who won the World Cup both as player and coach for Germany, has died at 78

 

He was not on the list.

Franz Beckenbauer, who won the World Cup both as player and coach and became one of Germany’s most beloved personalities with his easygoing charm, has died. He was 78.

Beckenbauer's death was first announced through a statement from his family to German news agency dpa and then confirmed by the German soccer federation.

“It is with deep sadness that we announce that my husband and our father, Franz Beckenbauer, passed away peacefully in his sleep yesterday, Sunday, surrounded by his family,” the family said in its statement. “We ask that we be allowed to grieve in peace and be spared any questions.”

The statement did not provide a cause of death. The former Bayern Munich great, who became affectionately known as the “Kaiser” — or “Emperor” — had struggled with health problems in recent years.

Beckenbauer also had to contend with allegations of impropriety in later years. But they did nothing to damage the esteem in which he was held.

“The world of FC Bayern is no longer the way it used to be – suddenly darker, quieter, poorer,” the Bavarian powerhouse said on its website.

Beckenbauer was one of German soccer's central figures. As a player, he reimagined the defender’s role in soccer and captained West Germany to the World Cup title in 1974 after it had lost to England in the 1966 final. He was the coach when West Germany won the tournament again in 1990, a symbolic moment for a country in the midst of reunification, months after the Berlin Wall fell.

“The ‘Kaiser’ was one of the best players our sport has ever seen,” German soccer federation president Bernd Neuendorf said. “With his lightness, his elegance and his vision, he set standards on the field. ... Franz Beckenbauer leaves a great legacy for the federation and soccer as a whole.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wrote on social media that Beckenbauer “inspired generations of enthusiasm for German soccer. We will miss him."

Beckenbauer's death comes just two days after the announcement that Mario Zagallo, the Brazilian who became the first person to win the World Cup as a player and coach, had died at the age of 92. The only other person to achieve that feat is France's Didier Deschamps.

Beckenbauer was also instrumental in bringing the highly successful 2006 World Cup to Germany, though his legacy was later tainted by charges that he only succeeded in winning the hosting rights with the help of bribery. He denied the allegations.

“We did not want to bribe anyone and we didn’t bribe anyone,” Beckenbauer, who headed the World Cup organizing committee, wrote in his last column for daily tabloid Bild in 2016.

Beckenbauer and three other members of the committee were formally made criminal suspects that year by Swiss prosecutors who suspected fraud in the true purpose of multi-million euro (dollar) payments that connected the 2006 World Cup with FIFA. But he was eventually not indicted in 2019 for health reasons and the case ended without a judgment when the statute of limitations expired in 2020 amid delays to the court system caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Beckenbauer was in 2014 briefly suspended by FIFA’s ethics committee from all football-related activity for failing to cooperate with prosecutor Michael Garcia’s probe of alleged corruption in the 2018 and 2022 World Cup votes. The suspension was lifted during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil when he agreed to cooperate.

The allegations damaged Beckenbauer’s standing in public perception for the first time. Until then, Beckenbauer had seemingly been unable to say or do anything wrong. Germans simply loved him.

“He did everything that a German is not supposed to do,” former Bayern Munich teammate Paul Breitner once said of the man popularly known as “Der Kaiser.”

“He got divorced, he left his children, took off with his girlfriend, got into trouble with tax collectors, left his girlfriend again.

“But he is forgiven for everything because he’s got a good heart, he’s a positive person and he’s always ready to help. He doesn’t conceal his weaknesses, doesn’t sweep his mistakes under the carpet,” Breitner said.

The son of a post official from the working-class Munich district of Giesing, Beckenbauer became one of the greatest players to grace the game in a career that also included stints in the United States with the New York Cosmos in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Born on Sept. 11, 1945, months after Germany’s surrender in World War II, Beckenbauer studied to become an insurance salesman but he signed his first professional contract with Bayern when he was 18.

“You are not born to become a world star in Giesing. Football for me was a deliverance. Looking back, I can say: Everything went according to how I’d imagined my life. I had a perfect life,” Beckenbauer told the Sueddeutsche newspaper magazine in 2010.

Beckenbauer personalized the position of “libero,” the free-roaming nominal defender who often moved forward to threaten the opponent’s goal, a role now virtually disappeared from modern football and rarely seen before his days.