For the next two weeks, ESPN FC is counting down the 20 greatest World Cup players of all time, with two unveiled per day until the final five. The identity of the No. 1 player will be announced on April 18.
Name: Gerd Mueller
Nationality: West Germany
Position: Striker
Clubs: 1861 Nordlingen (1963-64), Bayern Munich (1964-79), Fort Lauderdale Strikers (1979-81)
International career: 62 matches, 68 goals.
World Cup participation: 1970, 1974 - Played 13, Scored 14.
Finest World Cup moment: Winning goal in 1974 final.
Roll of honour: Winner 1974, Third place 1970
Ask a West German who was the key man to their country’s dominance of the international football scene in the early 1970s, and the answer is almost unanimous.
The Germans may have featured the inestimable talent of libero and captain Franz Beckenbauer, the commanding goalkeeping of Sepp Maier, and for a time the creative midfield genius of Gunter Netzer, but, in Deutscher minds, one man overrides those great names.
Bayern Munich striker Gerd Mueller scored goals at a bewildering rate, netting 14 in 13 World Cup finals games as West Germany finished third in 1970 and then, as hosts, won the 1974 finals. In the final in Munich’s Olympiastadion, Dutch dynamism was denied by a Mueller finish that showed off all his guile.
“Gerd Mueller would win every match, and he would score his goals in every match,” Paul Breitner, Mueller’s Bayern Munich colleague, tells ESPN FC. Breitner scored the Germans’ other goal, an equaliser from the penalty spot -- after Johan Neeskens had put Netherlands ahead inside two minutes -- in their 2-1 final win over Johan Cruyff’s favoured side.
“I tell you, I tell it to everybody, Gerd Mueller was the most important German football player after 1954. After the German team who won the World Cup [3-2 over Hungary] back then, Gerd Mueller was the most important,” continues Breitner. “Not Franz Beckenbauer, not Uwe Seeler. Gerd Mueller, because he gave to Bayern and the German national team all the cups, all the victories. He was the winner, and he is the man who is responsible for all these. This is the foundation.”
Mueller scored goals at a rate that only now, in this era of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, are players beginning to match. When, in 2012, Messi was closing in on the goal record for a calendar year, it was Mueller’s record he had to chase down: 85 goals scored in 1972.
Mueller, though, was a very different type of player to those current greats. He did not share their technical gifts. Instead, his squat physique was built to hold off defenders, and his reflexes did the rest. “Der Bomber” was a nickname that reflected a raining down of goals that continued throughout his career.
“When you all join me in the goal scoring I’ll come back and help you out,” is his reported rebuke to Beckenbauer when the Germans were under pressure and the captain had asked for some defensive assistance. Mueller did little else on the field, rarely taking part in buildup play. But when his chance came, he would be in the right place to score.
In 1970, he played alongside the aforementioned Seeler, a veteran of four finals tournaments, and scored 10 goals, which ranks as the third most scored by any player at a finals, after Just Fontaine’s 13 for France in 1958 and Sandor Koscis’s 11 for Hungary in 1954.
Four years on, he scored a comparatively low four, but it was his 76th-minute winner against Poland in the final match of the second group stage that took the Germans to the final. There, he scored what proved to be the decisive goal in West Germany’s Weltmeisterschaft win.
“He could control the ball in such a small space,” Walter Straten, sports editor of Bild, Germany’s best-selling newspaper, tells ESPN FC. “The goal against Netherlands in the final was totally characteristic. He turned around and sent the Dutch goalkeeper the wrong way without hitting the ball particularly hard. It was typically Gerd Mueller.”
It also proved to be Mueller’s final goal for Germany, his 68th in just 62 matches. He retired immediately after the victory in Munich.
In 1978, the Germans meekly surrendered their crown. That same year, Mueller had yet again finished as the top goal scorer in the Bundesliga, but he would not fly to Argentina. Munich was the end of the road for him. The West German national team was never quite the same without Mueller and his voracious appetite for goals.
Straten tells the story of why, at just 28, Mueller quit international football: “There was very big trouble the night of the World Cup final. There was a banquet, but the German football federation did not allow the players to bring their wives. It was unbelievable. Germany had become world champion and they were not allowed to celebrate with their wives, while the officials were allowed to celebrate with their own wives.
“Mueller, after the players left the banquet early, said he would never play again for Germany. Other players said the same but they later played again, but Mueller never did.”