Gerd Müller (75 †): Outside the field, however, he was in need of protection

She never liked a nickname. The “bomber of the nation” – that didn’t really suit him at all. Technically not, because “I don’t bomb my goals, I’ll make them out of the sixteenth.” After all, it is seldom the most beautiful, but mostly the important goals that he has scored. And the name invented by the boulevard never corresponded with its character either.

Because Gerd Müller was a peace-loving person who preferred to avoid all conflicts and always stayed in the background in life, even if he had every reason to jostle into the front row. He was the best German goalscorer of all time in the most popular sport in the world, football.

In the early morning of August 15th, a Sunday, Gerd Müller died at the age of 75.

He had been sick for a long time. In 1991 his alcohol addiction became public, he made a successful rehab at the insistence of his friends at FC Bayern and at least seemed to have won this fight. But it got worse. In February 2015 he was admitted to a dementia clinic in Wolfratshausen near Munich. A difficult time began for his wife Uschi, who visited him almost every day, and daughter Nicole. He still recognized her, but the old companions of yore were at some point only diffuse shadows in front of his eyes.

In his time, scoring goals was called “müllern”

He forgot them all, the Kaiser Franz, Maier Sepp, Paul Breitner and Uli Hoeneß, with whom he shot FC Bayern Munich into the football sky in the seventies. Many say he was the most important of all. Breitner, for example. “Gerd Müller is the most important and greatest footballer that Germany has had after 1954.” Or Franz Beckenbauer. “Perhaps without Gerd Müller and his gates we would still be in our old wooden hut on Säbener Strasse,” said the emperor at every opportunity. Because goals count in football and if someone stood for it, it was him. In his day, goalscoring was called “müllern”.

One thing is certain: Without him, the Bayern rocket would probably never have ignited so much and the German national team would have been poorer by many successes. European champion 1972 and world champion 1974 without Müller goals? Inconceivably.

Who was Gerd Müller? He is still synonymous with a goalscorer and his values ​​are the benchmark for those who followed him. No one has scored more Bundesliga goals than he (365), no more DFB Cup goals (78) and no German more European Cup goals (65) – all for Bayern Munich. And until 2014 he was also the top scorer for the national team (68 goals in 62 international matches) before Miroslav Klose overtook him at the World Cup in Brazil. Klose didn’t shake Müller’s monument: “I don’t think I’m going to be mentioned in the same breath as him. I have twice as many games, you don’t need to make a comparison. ”

A career full of records

Nobody can be compared with Gerd Müller, not even 38 years after his 1497th and last goal in the senior division in 1983 for the Fort Lauderdale Strikers in Florida, where he let his career end. As well as?

Müller won the cannon for the best Bundesliga shooter of a season seven times from 1967 to 1978, his 40 hits in 1971/72 remained unmatched until this summer, when Robert Lewandowski accomplished the feat of scoring 41 hits in one season. He was twice awarded the Golden Shoe for the best striker in European leagues, in 1970 he was top scorer in Mexico with ten goals and in the same year he was European Footballer of the Year. There was no solution to him; hundreds of defense lawyers despaired of him.

Müller was a phenomenon, “in the Middle Ages one would have suspected him of witchcraft,” wrote a reporter.

Nobody had his goal instinct, his quick reactions. Nobody could get him off his short, stocky legs so easily and against his shots, whether with his right or left, no weed was grown. Like on July 7, 1974, when he won the World Cup final against the Netherlands with his goal to make it 2-1. ARD reporter Rudi Michel said appreciatively: “Goals that Müller makes – that only Müller does. Because he has the shortest reflexes. ”

“A raging wolf in the penalty area”

And because he was always on the ball. Often seeming uninvolved, he struck at the last moment. “Outside the penalty area he’s a lamb, inside he becomes a raging wolf,” said the Austrian Norbert Hof after an international match that his opponent had decided with a typical Müller goal.

Outside the field, however, he was in need of protection. Born shortly after the war as a child of poor people in the Swabian town of Nördlingen, he had little education. With difficulty he completed an apprenticeship as a weaver. He didn’t speak any foreign languages ​​and was never bursting with self-confidence. Media appointments were anathema to him.

It never pushed the humble guy to the fore and when he had to replace Beckenbauer as captain in Munich at the end of his career, he felt extremely uncomfortable. Teammates cannot remember a fiery speech. In 1979 he went to Florida in anger after a substitution in the middle of the season and opened a steakhouse on the side, which still reminds of him today with a few pictures and a Bayern pennant.

He picked up the bottle more and more frequently

After three years he returned to his beloved Munich and was left with nothing. Müller didn’t have what it takes to be an authoritarian trainer, clever manager or eloquent TV expert and nobody had been waiting for him.

The days were long and he picked up the bottle more and more often. “You are up, floating in the sky. And fall and fall. Suddenly you’re in hell, “he said, looking back,” I suffered a lot and without the help of my friends I would probably not have made it. “FC Bayern shook hands with him, and Uli Hoeneß promised him a contract for life. And so they employed him as a striker trainer, assistant trainer for the amateurs, youth trainer or scout and in the VIP boxes he told the sponsors about the past on match days.

If he could just put on his FC Bayern tracksuit and drive to Säbener Strasse in the morning, then he would be happy. Only the terrible illness that doomed the patient to oblivion ended this touching arrangement of humanity.

If there is a football god, now he has a center forward. The very best!