Song, special jerseys and tracksuits, minute of silence: Bayern and its 75,000 supporters gathered in the Allianz Arena paid a moving tribute to Franz Beckenbauer on Friday evening during the championship match against Hoffenheim. The Kaiser, who died on Sunday at the age of 78, was buried at midday on Friday in a cemetery in the south of Munich.
“Danke Franz”
In the evening, in a polar cold of around -9°C and in a freezing fog, “his” Bayern Munich, which he helped grow as a player and then manager for almost half a century until becoming a giant of the planet football, paid him a first tribute.
During the warm-up, the Bayern players wore a jersey flocked with the number 5, which is forever associated with him, as well as training jackets from the 1970s, the era when Beckenbauer accumulated titles: European champion in 1972 and world champion in 1974 with West Germany, and three times winner of the European Champion Clubs’ Cup (1974, 1975, 1976), the ancestor of the Champions League.
On the Munich jersey, the inscription “Danke Franz” had been added, the same words which have been written since Tuesday on the LED facade of the Allianz Arena. The Bavarian club has planned a ceremony next Friday in this enclosure that Beckenbauer, then president, had built in the early 2000s to take the club to another dimension.
Applause then cathedral silence
From Friday evening, for the resumption of the championship after the winter break, the actors of the evening, black armbands on their arms, returned to the pitch accompanied by a song recorded by Beckenbauer just after the 1966 World Cup. We hear his voice there. young man, then barely 21 years old, intoned “Guten Freunde kann niemand trennen”, (“No one can separate good friends”), an ode to friendship engraved just after the final lost to England at Wembley .
These are the same notes that will now resonate with each Bayern goal, instead of the traditional “French Cancan”, as in the 18th minute of Friday evening’s match when Jamal Musiala opened the scoring for the Bavarians (3-0 final victory). ).
Jerseys and jackets sold at auction for the Kaiser Foundation
Before kick-off, players, officials and spectators marked a minute of meditation, launched by loud applause before ending in cathedral silence. Videos in memory of the 1972 and 1976 double Ballon d’Or were broadcast on the two giant screens of the Allianz Arena.
The Bayern ultras, in the Südkurve, unfurled the black and white banner, “The luminous figure (Lichtgestalt in German) begins its last journey. Rest in peace, Kaiser.” The warm-up jerseys and jackets will be autographed by the Bavarian players, then auctioned on the club’s online store. The funds will be donated to the “Franz-Beckenbauer-Stiftung”, an association founded by the Kaiser 40 years ago to help sick or disabled people.