German legend captain and coach, Franz Beckenbauer, has died at the age of 78.
Gatekeepers News reports that the DFB Vice President Hans-Joachim Watzke announced this on behalf of German Football Association said Monday.
Watze said, “Franz Beckenbauer was definitely the biggest German footballer of all time, and above all one of the greatest men who I have known.”
According to the DFB, Beckenbauer, one of only three men to win the World Cup as a player and as a coach, passed away on Sunday.
Former captain of the German team in the 1970s had in the last years been suffering from health problems and lived mostly withdrawn from the public eye in Salzburg, just across from the German border.
Beckenbauer, who was known in football-obsessed Germany as ‘the Kaiser’ meaning ‘the Emperor’, played a central role in some of the country’s greatest sporting achievements.
In 1945, Beckenbauer helped establish Bayern as his country’s strongest club in Munich.
In Munich in 1945, Beckenbauer helped establish Bayern as his country’s strongest club.
The German football legend, alongside Mario Zagallo who died aged 92 on Friday and Didier Deschamps, is one of only three men to have won the World Cup as both a player and a manager.
He captained West Germany to the 1974 World Cup title on home soil when they beat the Netherlands 2-1 in the Munich final, then managed the team that beat Argentina 1-0 in Rome to lift the trophy at Italia 90.
He was named European Footballer of the Year in both 1972 and 1976.
He made 424 appearances in the Bundesliga, scoring 44 goals, including in 13 years for Bayern, before joining Hamburg and New York Cosmos, where he finished his playing career in 1983.
Beckenbauer had stints as manager in club football at both Bayern and Marseille, winning the French league title in 1991 and the Bundesliga in 1994.
In 1996, he stopped coaching and his role as president of Bayern led to a place on the Executive Committee of football’s governing body FIFA.
In 2006, Beckenbauer led Germany’s successful bid to host the 2006 World Cup, a successful tournament that is still nostalgically referred to in Germany as “das Sommermaerchen” — ‘The summer fairytale’.
Spiegel, a magazine, however, broke a cash-for-votes scandal story in 2015, denting the legend’s bid for Germany in 2006.
Spiegel alleged that, in 2000, the German Football Association (DFB) had bought the votes of four Asian members of FIFA’s 24-strong executive committee to secure the hosting of the 2006 World Cup finals. Beckenbauer had maintained his innocence.
Beckenbauer’s last appearance at Bayern Munich’s Allianz Arena was in August 2022, when he attended a match of Bayern Munich against Borussia Moenchengladbach.
