It takes a lot to break Giovanni
Trapattoni. The most successful Italian
manager of all time has won titles in four countries and managed two
international teams with great distinction.
It took the 90s Bayern team two years to reduce him to this:
You can see where he’s coming
from (the translation is apparently accurate by the way, poor Giovanni got
himself so wound up his grasp of grammar slipped further than it normally does). No team has ever managed to combine success
with so much self destruction either before or since. In the 90s they won the Bundesliga and the DFB
Cup four times and one UEFA Cup. They
had players of the calibre of Elber, Mehmet Scholl, Jurgen Klinsman, Lothar
Matthaus, Stefan Effenberg and Mario Basler.
And also Carsten Janker. They were
often so busy trying to outdo each other off the pitch they forgot how to win
football matches. It would be impossible
for anyone else to lose a UEFA Cup tie to Norwich in the same year they ran
away with their domestic league. For 90s
Bayern it was merely an appetiser.
The FC Hollywood name has become
a bit overused of late, used to illustrate the glitz and glamour of Bayern against
the rest of the Bundesliga. The 90s was
when it first surfaced, an era when you had players calling up papers to plant
stories about each other, fights in training, players getting thrown out of
bars and the club hiring private investigators to trail their own players. If we’re honest with ourselves doesn’t that
sound much more entertaining than the togetherness and ruthless unity they’ve
shown this season?
Lothar Matthaus kicked the decade
off by being nicknamed the loudspeaker by the German press for his outbursts,
his most famous being the time he told a Dutch journalist that ‘Hitler must
have overlooked you.’ Which is pretty
hard to top. He also famously had a
running battle with Jurgen Klinsmann. They hated each other so much a live TV debate
had to be stopped when they wouldn’t stop arguing. This then led to Klinsmann demanding Lothar
was left out of the Euro 1996 squad. He
got his way but Lothar ended up outlasting him at Bayern to make life awkward
for everyone else.
Even in a squad lacking in self-discipline
Mario Basler was exceptional. ‘Super’ Mario’s
opinion of things like professionalism and time keeping where that they were
fine for other people. He once cheerfully
admitted that, ‘50% of players hate me.’
Presumably they were the 50% he played with (in mitigation its worth
pointing out how talented Basler was, in 1994-95 he scored 20 goals from
midfield in a 33 game season, including two direct from corners). After the 1996 European Championship he told
Playboy the best thing about the tournament was the fact the players were
allowed to have sex during it. That and
the drinking and smoking he got on with anyway.
Bayern eventually got so tired of Basler that they hired a private
investigator to follow him around, a fact that was plastered all over the front
page of Bild soon afterwards. Eventually
he walked out after they caught him drinking before a game one too many
times. In the 1999 Champions League
final he was the best player on the pitch by miles. When they lost he shrugged his shoulders and
drank so much they found him dancing on a table.
So to try and calm things down
they decided to resign Stefan Effenberg.
The press quickly dubbed Effenberg, Basler and Matthaus Le Trio Infernal
and started reporting on each of them badmouthing the others in the press
(Effenberg saved his best stuff, particularly about Matthaus, for his
autobiography). Der Tiger has always had
the air of someone killing time until his next fight. He played football like he was painfully
aware it was beneath him. His seeming contempt
for a game he was excellent at has never been bettered. At Bayern he managed to amass more yellow
cards (109) in the Bundesliga than anyone before or since. He also was fined after assaulting a woman in
a nightclub. His crowning glory has to
be stealing his teammate Thomas Strunz’s wife.
Predictably the press had a field day and Effenberg made sure everyone
knew he genuinely didn’t care.
It couldn’t last. Ottmar Hitzfeld was brought in and eventually
managed to calm it all down, mostly after Basler left and Matthaus and
Effenberg retired. And from that came the calm, thriving
mega-franchise that we have today. Even
more successful but let’s face it, compared to the 90s, fucking boring.
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