Berti Vogts on his 75th birthday: Gladbach and DFB legend

VBerti Vogts was a long way from being mild in old age shortly before his 75th birthday on December 30th. The 1974 world champion and former national coach wants to “have nothing more to do” with the club leaders of Borussia Mönchengladbach, the club in which the 1.68 meter long defender rose to a size in German football. “The topic is over for me,” he emphasized in an interview with the editorial cooperation G14plus, a network of several German regional newspapers. Only with his friend and long-time colleague Rainer Bonhof, Gladbacher and world champion like him, Vogts remains on friendly terms. Although Bonhof is vice president of the five-time German champions. “But I don’t talk to him about the club,” said Vogts in the interview, which at times reads like a statement.

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Vogts, who stayed with the “Fohlen” over his entire fourteen-year professional career (1965 to 1979) and rose to a football hero of the working class alongside other icons such as the artistic nature of Günter Netzer or the massive executor Jupp Heynckes, has been with Rolf Königs since 2004 President of Borussia, to speak badly. First of all, Vogts, as an unyielding right-wing defender nicknamed “Terrier”, blames him for the fact that his home club “doesn’t want to have much to do with its legends anymore”. A representation that Königs, Bonhof and others in the Lower Rhine cult club will probably soon be able to contradict. Vogts, however, attaches importance to the statement that “I always preferred telling the truth to diplomatic behavior”. Especially when he feels that he has been treated unfairly.

Once a terrier, always a terrier. With his bite and intransigence, this Rhinelander, who was orphaned after the untimely death of his parents at the age of twelve, has become a luminary in the area of ​​football, where people toil and tidy up particularly eagerly. Vogts, who was not even appointed to a district selection as a youth, was something like the popular counterpoint to the great football designers like Netzer or the Munich free spirit and libero Franz Beckenbauer, whom he enjoyed most of his time as a player 96 international matches was faithfully at your service.

The ideal mix of pioneers, including the defensive midfielder Bonhof, pioneers like Beckenbauer or Cologne’s Wolfgang Overath and a brilliant accomplisher like Munich’s Gerd Müller made the 1974 world champion. And also Borussia from Mönchengladbach, which dominated the Bundesliga together with FC Bayern in the 1970s. The fact that in his provocative interview Vogts also regretted “not listening to Franz Beckenbauer”, who at the time wanted to bring him “to Munich and later to Cosmos New York”, rounded off his angry birthday interview.

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