Franz Beckenbauer

Before him, defenders defended. The last man was the last man: he cleared the ball, he did not carry it, and if he crossed the halfway line something had gone badly wrong.

Beckenbauer took that position and walked forward with the ball, and football has never gone back. He is, as of 2026, the only defender to win the Ballon d'Or twice. He captained a World Cup-winning side, then managed one. He won three European Cups in a row as his club's captain. And he is the only person to have collected both silver and gold at a World Cup as a player and as a coach.

The argument he settled — that the deepest player on the pitch can also be the one who starts everything — is now so standard that it takes an effort to remember somebody had to make it.

He was born on 11 September 1945 in Maxvorstadt, Munich. His father was a postal worker. He started playing at nine, with SC München '06.

He wanted to play for 1860 Munich. "It was always my dream to play for them," he said. When SC München could no longer afford to run its youth section, he and his teammates planned to move to 1860 together.

Then, in the final of an under-14 tournament at Neubiberg, SC München played 1860, the niggle escalated, and Beckenbauer ended up in a physical confrontation with the opposing centre-half. The boys changed their minds and went to Bayern Munich instead — a club then in the regional league, not even in the Bundesliga.

That fight is one of the more consequential in the sport's history. Bayern had won nothing of significance. What followed was the club's transformation into the institution it now is.

He made his debut on 6 June 1964, at eighteen, playing on the left wing in a promotion play-off against St. Pauli.

He began experimenting with the sweeper role around 1968–69 and refined it into something new: a defender who takes the ball out from the back, dictates tempo, and functions as the team's deepest playmaker.

Bobby Charlton described what it was like to face: "The message he sent out was: 'Don't even try it. Coming out to face me is a waste of your time.'"

He captained Bayern from 1968–69 and West Germany from 1971.

30 July 1966, Wembley, 96,924 people. England 4–2 West Germany after extra time. Beckenbauer was twenty and had scored four goals on the way to the final, but he and Bobby Charlton spent the afternoon marking each other out of the game on their managers' instructions — two of the best footballers alive, cancelled. He was named the tournament's best young player.

17 June 1970, the Azteca, the semi-final against Italy that Mexico still calls the Game of the Century. Italy won 4–3 after extra time; five of the seven goals came in the extra half-hour. In the seventieth minute Beckenbauer dislocated his shoulder. West Germany had used both substitutions, so he had his arm strapped across his chest and played on. The photograph of him in that sling is the most reproduced image of his playing career. There is a plaque at the stadium.

18 June 1972, Brussels: West Germany 3–0 the Soviet Union in the European Championship final, Gerd Müller scoring twice.

7 July 1974, Munich, 78,200. West Germany 2–1 the Netherlands. The Dutch scored from a penalty before a German had touched the ball; Breitner equalised from another; Müller won it before half-time. Beckenbauer became the first captain to lift the current World Cup trophy.

He also became the first man to captain a side to the World Cup, the European Championship and the European Cup.

1974, at Heysel: Bayern 1–1 Atlético Madrid, Georg Schwarzenbeck equalising in the last seconds of extra time. The replay two days later finished 4–0 — the only European Cup final ever played twice, and still the only one as of 2026.

1975, Paris: Bayern 2–0 Leeds United, in a final Leeds spent decades arguing about. Two penalty appeals were waved away, one of them against Beckenbauer for handball, and when Peter Lorimer scored in the sixty-second minute Beckenbauer persuaded the referee to consult his linesman, and the goal was disallowed for offside.

1976, Hampden Park: Bayern 1–0 Saint-Étienne, Franz Roth scoring from a free kick after Beckenbauer rolled it to him.

Three in a row made Bayern the third club, after Real Madrid and Ajax, to manage it. They were allowed to keep the trophy. He was the first player to win three European Cups as his club's captain.

In 1977, at thirty-one, he took a contract with the New York Cosmos and retired from international football with 103 caps. He played four seasons in New York, won three Soccer Bowls, then two years at Hamburger SV, then one final season back at the Cosmos in 1983.

In 1990, as West Germany's manager, he won the World Cup again — 1–0 against Argentina in Rome, Brehme's penalty in the eighty-fifth minute. "There were no doubts whatsoever who was going to win," he said of it. "For 90 minutes we attacked Argentina and there was no feeling of any danger that a goal would be scored against us."

He is one of three men, with Mário Zagallo and Didier Deschamps, to have won the World Cup as player and manager.

He died on 7 January 2024 in Salzburg, aged seventy-eight. Bayern retired the number 5. The Allianz Arena's postal address is now Franz Beckenbauer Platz 5.

Two seasons at Hamburg, thirty-eight matches, no goals — from a man who scored sixteen in a season as a teenage winger. The career had turned into something else by then, and that is the honest shape of it.

He debuted on 26 September 1965 in Stockholm, a 2–1 World Cup qualifying win over Sweden. In 1973 he passed Uwe Seeler's 72 caps to become Germany's most-capped player, and held the record for twenty years until Lothar Matthäus.

Seven of those fourteen goals came in 1966 alone, when he was still being used much further forward.

Individual: Ballon d'Or 1972 and 1976, runner-up 1974 and 1975. German Footballer of the Year 1966, 1968, 1974, 1976. Best Young Player of the 1966 World Cup. Bundesliga Team of the Season twelve years running, from 1965–66 to 1976–77. NASL Most Valuable Player 1977. Laureus Lifetime Achievement Award 2007.

The popular story is that he posed for photographers beside a bust of an Austrian emperor in Vienna and the press christened him the Fußball-Kaiser. Welt am Sonntag calls that version untrue but very popular.

The account Wikipedia gives as the real one is better. After fouling Reinhard Libuda in a 1969 cup final, Beckenbauer stood in front of a hostile crowd juggling the ball. Libuda's nickname was König von Westfalen — King of Westphalia. The press decided that whatever Beckenbauer was doing required a higher title, and gave him Kaiser.

Günter Netzer: "He's the hero of our nation. It hasn't happened by chance, he's earned it by hard work."

Boris Becker: "Franz Beckenbauer symbolises football and a winning mentality. On top of that, he brought the World Cup to his own country."

The record is unusually complete — World Cup, European Championship, three European Cups, two Ballons d'Or, a World Cup as a manager — and yet it still undersells him, because the thing he actually did is not in any column.

Every team you watch now has a defender who is expected to carry the ball forward, break lines with a pass, and be the calmest player on the pitch when possession is won. That job did not exist in 1965. He invented it in front of a live audience, at the highest level, against people trying to stop him, and did it so well that within a decade it had stopped being unusual.