The future Gerd-Müller-Platz is illuminated in red, the Gerd-Müller statue is still covered with a red and white cloth. Apparently there are not many people from Nördlingen who stayed at home on Thursday evening, the narrow streets of the old town seem as crowded as the streets in Munich have not been for a long time at a Bayern Munich championship celebration. Most of the spectators don’t see anything of the ceremony, but all the football greats are right in front, right next to the statue that is about to be unveiled: Uli Hoeneß, Sepp Maier, Franz “Bulle” Roth.
Many people had come to see the unveiling of the statue.
(Photo: Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa)
But the children in the front row, they don’t yell Uli, they don’t yell Sepp, it’s just a different generation. They chant: “Markus, Markus!” Even the prime minister is taken aback, obviously he didn’t expect so much honor. So Markus Söder hesitantly raises his hand in greeting, then he realizes that the boys are serious. So he comes over – and signs their Bayern jerseys.
One to zero for the club, so to speak, whose declared fan Franke Söder is. Nobody saw that coming, on the day of honor for the greatest striker of all time, as everyone here assures. Nördlingen honors its most famous son with a statue that, as far as the hair is concerned, is more reminiscent of Gerd Müller, but that doesn’t matter: the thighs and calves are historically correct and voluminous, and there is no risk of confusion. And both Müller and FC Bayern get so much honor later in the evening that the distant Franconians in northern Swabia are immediately forgotten. If he wants to annoy his Prime Minister colleagues during video conferences, Söder quips, for example, he chooses the Allianz Arena as the background image. Success, that is to say, is at home in the Free State. “If FC Bayern is doing well,” whispers Söder, “Bayern is doing well too.”
And FC Bayern, on the other hand, is only doing so well today because Gerd Müller used to score his goals. Lots of goals. In his speech, the President of FC Bayern, Herbert Hainer, referred to him as the “most valuable player” the club has ever had, following a sentence by Franz Beckenbauer. In fact, the people of Nördlingen don’t just remember Gerd Müller fondly because of the goals, but because he was down-to-earth and kept in touch with his friends at home throughout his life. This may be an empty phrase elsewhere, but in this case it is documented, among others by Helmut Wurm. The childhood friend of the famous striker is leaning on two sticks in front of the monument and says that his buddy stopped by Nördlingen from time to time. Then they went for a beer. Only when he won against him in table tennis was Hadde, as Gerd Müller is called in Nördlingen, not so happy. “He didn’t like to lose,” says Wurm.
Gerd Müller scored the winning goal in the 1974 World Cup final in Munich – the template for the sculpture.
(Photo: Werner Baum/dpa)
He didn’t have to, especially in football. The statue by the Aschaffenburg artist Herbert Deiss depicts what is probably his most famous goal, the turning shot in the 1974 World Cup final against the Netherlands for a 2-1 win. There had been some trouble in Nördlingen about the location of the statue. The Nördlinger insisted on assigning Gerd Müller a place in the historic old town. After some discussions and after consultation with widow Uschi Müller, the city finally agreed on the current location near the striker’s birthplace. Gerd Müller used to play almost every cobblestone here, as Mayor David Wittner explains.
Wittner is obviously a courageous man. Of course, he also honors Müller’s goals and thighs in his speech. In his speech, however, it is also important to him to emphasize that football has changed, see the upcoming World Cup in Qatar, which is controversial, among other things because of the human rights situation there. Not many who have the proven defender of Qatar sponsorship agreements, Uli Hoeneß, are close at hand, dare to address this.
Former FC Bayern goalkeeper Sepp Maier (left) and Uli Hoeneß, honorary president of the club, attended the ceremony.
(Photo: Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa)
Hoeneß lets it be, he prefers to say what everyone says: “Gerd Müller deserves the statue.” He doesn’t even want to criticize the hair modeled into a modern gel hairstyle, which didn’t even look nearly like it in the dynamic of the shot on goal. That’s done by other companions like “Bulle” Roth and Sepp Maier, who also joke that the bronze football boots look more like Nike than Adidas. Hadde wouldn’t have worn anything like that. “Pretty big rags,” agrees Uschi Müller after the ceremony, long after the statue has been unveiled. “Gerd had small feet, 40s.”
FC Bayern scarves, FC Bayern jerseys: Gerd-Müller-Platz will be the name of the statue’s future location, which couldn’t hold the masses of visitors on Thursday evening.
(Photo: Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa)
It doesn’t matter, say the people of Nördlingen, many of whom even the pensioners have appeared with FC Bayern flags. The band plays “Dann macht es Bumm”, the Gerd Müller song from his playing days. The striker, who died in August 2021 after a long illness, would have turned 77 on Thursday. Now they have immortalized the man with the golden nose for goal on his birthday – in bronze.