“For me,” Helmut Schön said of Franz Beckenbauer in February 1965 after calling him up to the West Germany team for the first time, “he is the player of the future. Maybe not in midfield, perhaps up front.”
People were always looking at Beckenbauer and seeing in him a being from another age, and that meant that, for a long time, nobody really knew what to make of him. He was handsome, charismatic and languid, a player of effortless elegance guaranteed to enrage those who believed the game was about industry, sweat and graft. He was technically gifted. He saw things others didn’t. He had grace and intelligence.
