A youth-match scuffle sent Beckenbauer to Bayern instead of his favourite club
As a boy, Franz Beckenbauer dreamed of playing for 1860 Munich, and his whole youth team planned to move there together. Then the two sides met in an under-14 final, tempers flared, and Beckenbauer came to blows with an opposing defender. Offended, the boys signed for Bayern Munich instead, and football history turned on it.
He was born on 11 September 1945 in Munich's Maxvorstadt district, the younger son of a postal worker, and grew up in working-class Giesing, where he served as an altar boy. His father was sceptical about football, but at nine Franz joined the youth side of SC Munich '06 as a centre-forward, idolising the 1954 World Cup winner Fritz Walter. The club could no longer afford its youth teams, which is why the move to 1860 had been planned before that tournament in Neubiberg turned sour. He joined Bayern's youth ranks in 1959.
His path was not smooth. At 18 he was banned from West Germany's youth team after it emerged that his girlfriend was pregnant and he did not intend to marry her; coach Dettmar Cramer got him reinstated. He debuted for Bayern on the left wing in a promotion play-off on 6 June 1964, and the club won its second-tier league that season and went up to the Bundesliga.
Starting in midfield, he made his reputation at centre-back and is often said to have invented the modern sweeper, or libero. Bayern won the Cup Winners' Cup in 1967 and three European Cups in a row from 1974 to 1976, making him the first player to captain a club to three. He earned 103 caps, was twice European Footballer of the Year, and was the first captain to lift the World Cup, the European Championship and the European Cup. Having raised the World Cup as captain in 1974, he won it again as manager in 1990, a double shared only with Mario Zagallo and Didier Deschamps.
Known as der Kaiser, the Emperor, he later played for the New York Cosmos, served as Bayern's manager and president, and led Germany's bid for the 2006 World Cup. A fraud and money laundering inquiry tied to that tournament opened in 2016 and closed in 2020 without a verdict because the time limit had run out. He died on 7 January 2024.
Source: Franz Beckenbauer
