by “For me,” Helmut Schön said of Franz Beckenbauer in February 1965, after calling him up to the West Germany national team for the first time, “he is the player of the future. Maybe not in the center of the field, maybe up front.”
People always looked at Beckenbauer and saw in him a being from another era, and that meant that, for a long time, no one really knew what to do with him. He was handsome, charismatic and languid, a player of natural elegance guaranteed to infuriate those who believed the game was about industry, sweat and toil. He had technical talent. He saw things that others did not see. He had grace and intelligence.
Related: Obituary of Franz Beckenbauer
From his adolescence it was evident that Beckenbauer would be a player of the highest level. But in what position? Nobody could solve it. And so, effectively, a role was invented. Beckenbauer is now considered the great example of the libero, but he was not a libero in the Italian sense, sitting behind a hard-man marker and initiating attacks with long-range passes. As he himself said, if he looked like someone from the great Internazionale of Helenio Herrera, who popularized the idea of the libero by winning two European Cups with his catenaccioIt was left back Giacinto Facchetti, an excellent defender who moved forward to create angles in midfield and join the attack.
Beckenbauer’s early career was the story of a player looking for a role. When he made his debut for Bayern in 1964, at the age of 18, in the promotion play-off against St Pauli, he moved to the left wing. In his next match, against Tasmania Berlin, he again played at centre-half as Rainer Ohlhauser was pushed forward as Bayern looked for an equalizer and did well enough to play there again against Borussia Neunkirchen. In the second group game against St Pauli, he started as a midfielder, then moved into defense to help deal with the threat of Guy Acolatse, and finished as a striker as Bayern chased a winner.
West German teams in those days tended to play an adaptation of the WM, in which one of the halves dropped back behind the center half to play as a Ausputzer –literally, a cleaner–, but he didn’t have creative instructions like he would have had in Italy. Rather, the centre-half picked up the opposition centre-forward but had limited license to step forward, knowing he had cover behind him. Beckenbauer went much further than anyone before.
Bayern missed out on promotion by one point that season, but reached the Bundesliga the following campaign with Beckenbauer as the regular centre-half despite newspapers constantly saying he could be better deployed as one of the more creative midfielders.
Zlatko Cajkovski, Bayern’s coach, apparently had similar doubts and, that summer, brought in the combative Dieter Danzberg to act as his centre-half, allowing Beckenbauer to advance further. But Danzberg was sent off in the first game of the following season, a derby against 1860 Munich, and was banned for eight weeks. Beckenbauer took his place and never left him. The culmination of an excellent first campaign in the top flight came against SV Meiderich in the 1966 German Cup final.
Beckenbauer’s attacks had been limited by having to deal with center forward Rüdiger Mielke, but with eight minutes left and Bayern leading 3-2, Ohlhauser recovered the ball and suddenly realized that Beckenbauer had come out. He spotted it, Beckenbauer kept running and scored the decisive goal from the edge of the area. His role as a libero was confirmed and, with Georg Schwarzenbeck as an essential but largely unknown stopper alongside him, he would underpin Bayern’s success in the 1970s.
On the national team, Beckenbauer’s role was more controversial. In that first match, in February 1965, an unofficial friendly against Chelsea, Beckenbauer played in midfield while Schön experimented with a back four. Apart from two matches on a tour of South and Central America in 1968, when Willi Schulz was used as a marker and Beckenbauer had to take over his role at the back, he remained there until 1971, when Schön finally agreed to allow Beckenbauer to play as a libero. .
The following year, Beckenbauer was at the heart of the West Germany team which, in beating England 3-1 at Wembley in the first leg of the Euro 72 quarter-final, produced a fascinatingly brilliant half-hour. It was, said L’Équipe, “the football of the year 2000”. This was, at last, Beckenbauer’s age.
The truth, however, is that as advanced as West Germany seemed compared to Alf Ramsey’s decadent England, this was football in the early 1970s. It is said that trying to keep the game in the shadow of the main stand in the heat of León during the 1970 World Cup had shown West Germany how possession could be manipulated and the freedom Beckenbauer had to get off the backline, offering an extra advantage. man, was instrumental in allowing them to operate like this. The style, a kind of Total Football without pressure, gave rise to both the 1972 Euro Cup and the 1974 World Cup.
Time finally caught up with the man of the future. As a coach, Beckenbauer was conservative. “A defensive posture,” he said, “corresponds to Germany’s nature… we stagnate, narrate the opponent’s game and then impose our game on them.”
When Klaus Augenthaler suggested switching to a back four, Beckenbauer insisted that “our character, our system” was a libero plus markers. It brought two World Cup finals in 1986 and 1990, the latter won, but probably delayed the arrival of pressure, leading to the lost decade of the 90s (despite the strange outlier of winning Euro 96) and the subsequent reboot.
But why would Beckenbauer have been a great theorist? Why would he, as a coach, have been part of the tactical vanguard? As a player, by being who he was, without having to conceptualize it, he had changed the way of playing. He emerged as a player out of time, and made football adapt to him.
