Franz Beckenbauer: Leadership was the German football icon's greatest strength

WWhat connects Franz Beckenbauer with the national soccer team, which wants to unite people behind it again at the European Championships in Germany in a few months? Few. The obituaries paint the picture of a magician of football who fascinated his spectators with the elegance and lightness of his game. Standing upright, adjusting from the ankle, not making too much movement, Beckenbauer showed nothing of the hard, sweaty work, the ambition and doggedness with which the Germans were characterized when they had once again asserted themselves.

He didn't seem to be working hard like the players at Schalke, he seemed to be floating across the field, usually one step, especially one thought, ahead of his hunters. In the martial art of football, with his slats plowing through the grass, he kept everyone at a distance. This wasn't a 90-minute job. That was an art. And not an unemployed one, as in Germany, even after Beckenbauer's time on the field, people mockingly said of those who could do everything with the ball but never won titles. Beckenbauer won whatever was important to win.

Beckenbauer's contribution to the development of football

The greatest success for the boy from a humble background was not his rise to the rank of the most admired German alive, but his contribution to the development of football into a social event. Beckenbauer may have briefly sought proximity to a world that tended to meet on the Wagners' hill in Bayreuth. But he didn't need that. She came to him. The educated citizens, the corporate leaders, the writers, the actors, the artists wanted to see the footballer, his art – in the stadium.

Soon also high politics. When the “Miracle of Bern” happened on July 4, 1954, and Germany became soccer world champions for the first time, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer never dreamed of attending the game. On that Sunday, which some consider to be the Federal Republic's actual birthday, he hosted the Prime Minister of Greece. Twenty years later, Federal President Walter Scheel and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt congratulated Beckenbauer on winning the World Cup in the Munich Olympic Stadium. Prime Minister Angela Merkel even appeared in the dressing room after an international match in 2010 and shook hands with half-naked people.

Beckenbauer had achieved what thrilled people all over the world and in Germany with the summer fairy tale of 2006 decades before. Appearing magically on the pitch, detached from everything earthly, seemingly committed only to the beauty of the game.

What a bitter irony that in the last chapter of his life, on the way to the 2006 World Cup in his homeland, he got caught up in the network of corrupt international management, whose greed and greed for profit increasingly alienated fans from football. Beckenbauer particularly disenchanted himself with the inelegant defense of not wanting to have read what he had signed as head of the organizing committee, with the ignorance of the person who leaves the dirty work to others.

The announcement that they would work “on a voluntary basis, of course” was contradicted by a sponsorship contract for 5.5 million euros that was kept secret for a long time. Gone was sovereignty. The efforts of former top politicians and companions to recognize the hypocrisy of society behind the disenchantment do not help. Even if those familiar with the football world knew how applicants got to World Cups, what's wrong with people's outrage over corruption?

He directed and delegated

As an initially more or less uneducated boy from Munich's southeastern district of Giesing, Beckenbauer rose to become a central figure in German football. He did not serve on the field or as a team or OC manager. He directed and delegated. He united the difficult characters in his world champion team and distributed the roles according to ability.

Georg Schwarzenbeck at FC Bayern and Bertie Vogts in the national team cleared everything around him, just as his advisors later tried to do. Not because he ordered it, but because the best in Germany immediately recognized that it was their captain, their coach, who gave them, his teams, Bayern, the 1974 and 1990 world champions the structure and self-confidence of a winning team.

There was much more meticulousness and hard work behind this than Beckenbauer ever let on. But above all, respect for an authority that cannot be trained. It is given. And she is missed in German football. There are enough national players today who move as light-footed as they are fast. But the team is fundamentally missing what made Beckenbauer so untouchable in sport for most of his life: leadership.