How Gerd Müller Came to the Strikers

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.

"In England you make one mistake and 25,000 fans get down on you"

European players flocked to the North American Soccer League in the mid-70s for one main reason – the opportunity to make money. Once here, however, many found good reasons to stay longer than they’d intended. The change in climate, lifestyle and culture surprised many who’d grown up in a country like grey, repressive Britain. When they coached and communicated at the educational clinics that they were contractually obliged to conduct, players stumbled upon the chance to develop both their careers and their personalities. The open-mindedness, the vastness and the possibilities of America were still relatively unfamiliar concepts in the 1970s to young lads who’d spent their lives focused on nothing but themselves and their football within the very narrow environment of the British game.

Gordon Banks can't quite shake
off his roots in Fort Lauderdale.

In Chapter 3 of Rock n Roll Soccer, ‘Leaving old Europe behind’, several players cite the enthusiasm of the home crowd as a reason why they loved playing in the NASL, as opposed to the open hostility they would encounter from even their own supporters. As former St. Mirren defender Charlie Mitchell says, in Scotland ‘if you made one mistake then the crowd would boo you and be right on your back.’ You also had to ‘fight like a bastard’ to get into the team. At his new club the Rochester Lancers, though, the crowd didn’t understand the game well enough to know when he’d even made a mistake, and if they did, then they didn’t care. 

Here’s a short extract reflecting how some of the NASL’s more famous names enjoyed finding themselves in a world where they could function as normal people:

‘One of the reasons I came to America was that I didn’t think I could live up to the standards I had set back home,’ said Gordon Banks, shortly after joining the Fort Lauderdale Strikers in the late 1970s. ‘If I can’t live up to it, people here won’t be saying, I remember him when. This takes a lot of weight off your shoulders. I won’t miss the finger-pointing kind of thing. I wasn’t the kind of person who liked it any­way.’ Franz Beckenbauer was more explicit. ‘Everybody likes to be famous,’ he conceded. ‘But it is an enjoyable difference here [in New York]. In Munich when I went out at night I could read in the paper the next day every place I had been, who I went with, what I ate. Photographers and journalists followed me everywhere. I had a big house surrounded by a big wall. After a game I went home, locked the gate and shut out the world. In the US I can go unrecognized. I have a private life. I had none in Germany.’ The German press, he said, only aimed to ‘tear you down’.

Former Manchester United goalkeeper Alex Stepney came to Dallas in 1979 and enjoyed the simple pleasure of a trip to the amusement park with his family. Back home, he said, you ‘couldn’t go out for a quiet drink or dinner. There was always someone who knew who you were, and it became a bit of a bind. People were quite ruthless. When my wife and kids were here, we went to Six Flags, and it was absolutely fabulous. No one knew us. We wouldn’t do things like that in England.’

A trip to Six Flags amusement park was absolutely fabulous. The kind of activity most average parents dread for weeks and then endure for a long and expensive day was, for Stepney, a wonderfully mundane trip free of some knucklehead fol­lowing him around and shouting out ‘Fuck Man United!’ Peter Osgood, upon arriving in Philadelphia in 1978, was also enjoying the lack of on-street recognition. ‘It’s nice and easy at the moment,’ he said. ‘Nice and quiet. You don’t get too many people bugging me. I’m enjoying the obscurity. It’s a much more quiet, much more relaxed life.’ Ex-Coventry forward Alan Green was happy to return full-time to the Washington Diplomats after a loan spell, despite a very English penchant for watching Benny Hill over a cup of afternoon tea. ‘One of the big reasons,’ he said, ‘was that when I came here I had a lot more confidence in my ability. I’m the type of player who needs a pat on the back, but in England you make one mistake and 25,000 fans get down on you.’

Bermudan striker Clyde Best – one of Britain’s first black soccer players in the late 1960s and early 1970s – left West Ham United for the Tampa Bay Rowdies in 1975 because of the naked racism in England at the time, both on and off the field. Even though he made almost 200 league appearances for the Hammers, and was eventually accepted by the home support, ‘I began to think, why should I go out there and per­form when I have to put up with that sort of stuff? There were problems with the amount of abuse I was taking and I decided I didn’t have to put up with it.’ Rather than point fingers at the English, and without explicitly mentioning that the abuse was racial, Best generously called it ‘a situation that is all over the world. No matter where you go, you can’t find a place where that sort of thing doesn’t exist.’ In the US, though, such abuse was presumably less prevalent, given that he spent the entire final decade of his career there.

Pre-order Rock n Roll Soccer here (UK) or here (US).

The Opening Paragraph

Here are the opening two paragraphs of ‘Rock n Roll Soccer’. When I'm in a  shop, here's how I decide whether or not to buy a book: I read the blurb on the back. If I make it through the blurb on the back, I read the opening paragraph. If I really like the opening paragraph, I buy the book. If I really, really like the opening paragraph, I stand there and keep reading until my legs start to ache, and then I go and buy the book.

It’s therefore an understatement to say that I spent quite a bit of time making sure I was happy with the book’s opening paragraph. The introduction is headed by a quote from the North American Soccer League’s irrepressible commissioner, the wonderful Phil Woosnam, who did more than any single figure (including Pelé) to push the league briefly into the US sporting stratosphere.

NASL commissioner Phil Woosnam

‘This sport will take off. There is absolutely no way that it will not bypass everything else. This country will be the centre of world soccer. In the 80s there will be a mania for the game here. There will be three to five million kids playing it. The North American Soccer League will be the world’s No. 1 soccer league. And it will be the biggest sports league in the USA.’

—North American Soccer League Commissioner Phil Woosnam, 1977.

No one ever accused the North American Soccer League Commissioner Phil Woosnam of lacking in optimism. It was, after all, the former Aston Villa forward’s drive and diligence that had rescued the nascent professional soccer league from the brink of extinction after just one year of play in 1968. Less than ten years later under his stewardship, the League was not only succeeding and expanding beyond the wildest of expectations, but was turning into a roller-coaster phenomenon that really might fulfil Woosnam’s brash and bullish forecast: number one sport in America, number one soccer league in the world. Yet again, the Yanks were coming with their arrogance, their money, their revolutionary vision and their self-belief, sweeping aside a century of tradition as they stormed forward into a shiny future that was splashed with character, colour and cool.

    A few months after Woosnam’s bold forecast, the New York Cosmos beat the Fort Lauderdale Strikers 8–3 in a sold-out NASL playoff game at Giants Stadium, New Jersey. The attendance was 77,691, and the Cosmos starting line-up featured Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, Carlos Alberto and Giorgio Chinaglia. The NASL was at its zenith, and this single game sums up everything the league stood for – a huge crowd, tons of goals and some of the biggest names in world soccer. There were celebrities in the stands and leggy cheerleaders on the touchline. What could possibly go wrong? It’s easy to ask that question now with a knowing smile. Arguably of more interest are the things that went right...