The day after the announcement of the death of Franz Beckenbauer, the people of Munich timidly began on Tuesday, in a polar cold, to pay tribute to their Kaiser, legend of German football and source of inspiration for several generations.
The thermometer, which showed -8 degrees in the morning, must have probably discouraged more than one. Rare fans paraded on Tuesday at Säbener Strasse, the headquarters of Bayern Munich, where Beckenbauer acquired his letters of nobility, including three coronations in the European Champion Clubs’ Cup, the ancestor of the Champions League (1974, 1975 and 1976).
“In 1990, when he became world champion as coach, when he walked alone, these seconds, these minutes, these are my childhood memories of Beckenbauer,” explains Bogdan Piecuch, a 45-year-old Bayern supporter, in front of the headquarters of the club.
On Wednesday, Munich residents will be able to go to the City Hall or the Bavarian Chancellery, in the center of the city, where two books of condolence will be set up.
A bouquet of flowers and a candle were left at the entrance to the club, which the champion, who died on Sunday at the age of 78, helped to elevate it to the rank of power on the football planet, as a player alongside Gerd Müller and Sepp Maier in the 1960s and 1970s, then as a leader with Uli Hoeness and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge in the 1990s and 2000s.
The Twitter account and website of the “Rekordmeister” were also dressed in black as a sign of mourning. Bayern host Hoffenheim on Friday evening at 8:30 p.m. at the Allianz Arena, where the 75,000 spectators should pay him a very emotional tribute. A minute of silence will be observed before the championship matches this weekend and the players will wear a black armband. In the meantime, the facade of the stadium will be lit at night, with the message “Danke Franz” (“Thank you Franz”).
Before the start of training in the afternoon, Bayern players posed with two jerseys featuring Beckenbauer’s No. 5, including an original worn by Beckenbauer on June 26, 1965 for the Bundesliga play-off against Bayern Munich. Tennis Borussia Berlin.
The date and location of the funeral of Beckenbauer, who “fell peacefully” surrounded by his family in Sazlburg (Austria) on Sunday, have not yet been communicated.
“The world of football and beyond mourns our friend Franz. Bayern, in gratitude and remembrance, should organize a funeral ceremony for him in this stadium (the Allianz Arena), which would never have seen the light of day without him,” judged Rummenigge, member of the Bayern supervisory board, in the German tabloid Bild.
The Allianz Arena will probably remain Beckenbauer’s main material legacy for “his” Bayern, when the decision was made in the early 2000s to build a new stadium. Winner of the Champions League as Bayern coach in 2001, Ottmar Hitzfeld also proposed, in an article on the t-online portal, to rename the venue Franz-Beckenbauer Arena.
The German press devoted the front page to him on Tuesday. Bild has produced a montage of photos summarizing his work: lifting the World Cup with the German jersey in 1974, hands in his pockets on the lawn of the Olympic stadium in Rome after the planetary coronation as coach in 1990, or still holding the poster for the 2006 World Cup, which he obtained the organization for Germany.
Beyond the world-famous nickname “Kaiser Franz”, acquired during a German Cup final in 1969 against Schalke 04, and mythologized during a photo in Vienna in 1971 at the foot of the statue of the emperor of Austria Franz Joseph I, the Süddeutsche Zeitung preferred to highlight that of “Lichtgestalt”. Behind this difficult to translate word hides the image of a “luminous figure” of German football.
