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| Müller: unwanted in Deutschland, a superstar in the NASL |
Today's edition of the German
bi-weekly Kicker tells the bitter story
of how West Germany's World Cup-winning striker Gerd Müller was forced out of
Bayern Munich in the late 1970s and went to finish his career at the NASL's
Fort Lauderdale Strikers.
The article begins by talking
about how players who have recently left the club, such as Bastian
Schweinsteiger and Mario Mandzukic, were fully praised by coach Pep Guardiola
even as they were being eased out of the door. Müller was no less of a club
legend than Schweinsteiger, yet the man who scored 398 league goals for the
club in only 453 games was, in his own words, "systematically
destroyed" by his Bavarian bosses.
His former team-mate Frank Roth
confirms that "Gerd was properly squeezed out. That's not how you do
things, it was not fair. It was not a pleasant departure." At the time,
the team's commercial director Walter Fembeck said, "He [Müller] has to
understand that he's no longer the
best." Club President Wilhelm Neudecker was no more tactful: "We need
Gerd as a striker, not as a monument."
Müller was the Bundesliga's
leading scorer in seven seasons spanning the period 1967-1978. He won the
German title four times, likewise the German FA Cup, not to mention the
European Champions' Cup three times. Yet Bayern's Hungarian coach was ruthless
in his analysis of the striker after substituting 'The Bomber' in February 1979
for the first time in his career during a 2-0 loss at Eintracht Frankfurt:
"Only achievement counts -
and Gerd Müller has not achieved anything for some games now. He's lacking in
fitness and mobility. If his former coaches turned a blind eye, that was up to
them. That's not how I operate."
On February 14, Müller sent the
club his resignation letter by taxi and left for the Strikers "without
flowers and without warm words for the man to whom Bayern owed so much",
as Kicker puts it. After his career
finished, Müller turned to the bottle, and only when his alcoholism became
public in the early 1990s did Bayern remember its former star. Franz
Beckenbauer and Uli Hoeness intervened to help him give up booze and found him
a job at the club.
The move to America was almost
certainly the right one for Müller, even if the manner of his departure from
Germany still beggars belief. He and Peruvian forward Teofilo Cubillas formed a
prolific partnership up front for Fort Lauderdale in 1979, and took the team
into the playoffs. "Neither
spoke each other’s language," said David Chadwick, who was an assistant
coach at the Florida team, in an interview for Rock N Roll Soccer in 2013. "I couldn’t speak either language,
but I noticed in training with players like that, they all understand - they
want to be challenged, they want to work, they do have an appetite for the
game, that’s what made them great players. It was their eyes that made such a
difference, you could just sense they knew exactly what was going on."
Chadwick
said that he "learnt as a coach so much from being around Gerd Müller and
seeing how he turned players in the box. When I grew up you did the Matthews,
you dropped the shoulder and exploded past someone. I was good at that, but I
learnt so much more from these other players in the NASL."
In 1980, Cubillas and Müller were
on even better form, and the pair's goals lead the Strikers to the 1980 Soccer
Bowl, which they lost 3-0 to the Cosmos. In 1981, Müller's goals finally dried
up and he sensed that was the moment to retire. A venture with a steakhouse
didn't work out, but following his rehabilitation he later became the long term
assistant coach of Bayern's reserve team.
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