Thomas Bach’s heartfelt farewell to Franz Beckenbauer: “He was a sports legend far beyond soccer”

With the death of Frank Beckenbauer, the world of soccer says goodbye to one of those considered to be the best of all time. Arbitrarily, we could say that if we established a top five between Maradona, Pelé, Cruyff, Di Stefano and the German crack, we would not clash at all. At least, that’s how most of the lists were designed before the explosion of Lionel Messi, to a lesser extent, Cristiano Ronaldo. Also arbitrarily, we could talk about three versions of the same soccer player.

The first, the brightest and most explosive. As a teenager, he appeared brilliantly as the central flyer of Bayern Munich, his team for 20 seasons. He made his debut for his country’s senior national team when he was only 19 years old and, months later, he shone at the World Cup in England, where he played all six games of the tournament and scored 4 goals, an uncommon figure for a central midfielder. That Beckenbauer took home the silver medal of the runner-up.

Four years later, in Mexico, the second version of the phenomenon appeared. Already positioned as a central defender, he began to display his elegance to initiate his team’s movements much more than working on the defensive aspect itself. Germany won the bronze medal. The long-awaited world title came, oddly enough, with a decidedly less daring Beckenbauer, captain of the team and always distinguished, but increasingly assisted by his rear teammates. So much so that in the legendary final against the Netherlands, coach Helmut Schön assigned side scorer Berti Vogts the task of scoring Johan Cruyff.

The last version of the so-called Kaiser arrived in the 80s when he was one of the stars with which the United States league tried to seduce the public massively, something that still seems to be a pending issue. The one who arrived at the New York Cosmos was much more of a great name than a great soccer player. In any case, Beckenbauer’s brilliant record concludes with a detail reserved for only three people. He, Mario Zagallo (Brazil) and Didier Deschamps (France) are the only ones to have been world champions as soccer players and as coaches. The German achieved this in 1990 by defeating Argentina, a team to which he had lost the final four years earlier.

Beckenbauer may have had a sporting link with Olympism, but the squad that won the bronze medal in Tokyo 1964 on behalf of the Unified German Team consisted mostly of players from the then East Germany. As for the link outside the sport, everyone has the right to choose the version they like the most. Here is an outline about it.

Meanwhile, the Olympic movement and Beckenbauer did have one person in common, another German, a “close friend” as Thomas Bach defined it in a heartfelt farewell message published by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

“It was with great sadness that I learned of the death. He was a legend of the sport far beyond football. For me personally, he was a close and loyal friend for more than four decades, someone you could always trust,” said the president of the IOC, who praised his “outgoing personality and his humility in dealing with people” while highlighting his “sporting success as a player, national coach and president of the Organizing Committee of the 2006 World Cup”.

Precisely, the 2006 World Cup splashed the image of Beckenbauer, president of the Organizing Committee, after being accused of corruption in October 2015 in an investigation by the weekly ‘Der Spiegel’. “I didn’t pay anyone to get votes in the award of the 2006 World Cup in Germany,” defended the Kaiser, in one of the few statements he gave at the time. Precisely, the last public appearance was at the beginning of that month with Bach at Camp Beckenbauer, in Kitzbühel (Austria), a congress that the former president of the IOC usually attended.

“Thomas Bach assumes that it is in the interest of soccer for these accusations to be the subject of a rapid and thorough investigation,” the agency said. The European country won the vote against South Africa (it would organize the World Cup four years later) by 12 votes to 11. The investigation of Beckenbauer and other members of the German Federation was for fraud, embezzlement and money laundering: questioned by Swiss prosecutors in March 2017, the case finally barred.

Beckenbauer was one of the celebrities present at Bach’s 60th birthday, who described Franz as “a friendly and very respectful ambassador of Germany and of soccer around the world, and he was always a welcome friend of the entire Olympic movement”.

Despite this friendship with the Olympic movement, Beckenbauer had harsh words with IOC members when Munich was not chosen to host the 2018 Winter Games: “I find it disgusting that Europeans don’t help other Europeans, for purely selfish reasons.” Pyeongchang (South Korea) prevailed over the German city and Annecy (France). Kaiser himself was present in Durban, South Africa, where the election took place.

“I will deeply miss the encounters and conversations with him. The IOC will remember him with honor and gratitude. My thoughts are with his dear wife Heidi, who took such loving care of him during the difficult time of his illness, his children and his family,” Bach closed the message in which he salute the legend.