Football’s all-conquering Emperor, German great Franz Beckenbauer no more

Franz Beckenbauer not just embodied the ideals of German football, its fabled tenacity and indefatigability. But he was German football itself.

One of just three men to have lifted the World Cup as both player and manager, he was arguably the greatest footballer his country has produced, the man who reinvented the role of a defender in the game. He was arguably the greatest leader on the football pitch his country has churned out, whose single-minded defiance upset one of the greatest football teams of all time, the Total Footballers of Johan Cruyff; he was also a legendary manager too, the spiritual figurehead of a raft of managers from his country.

A bigger nod to his personality could be that he stopped Cruyff as a player, and strangled Diego Maradona as a manager.

Stories behind the nickname Kaiser

He owned the most fitting of sobriquets in the game. Der Kaiser. The Emperor. On the field, he exuded an emperor-like aura, in utter control of his men, in absolute mastery of his opponents. Every move was measured; every action was gauged. Even the most rebellious of teammates would listen to his words, as though enamoured by his personality. There are several tales of how he got the moniker.

One of them was that it first came on the cover of a magazine that said he looked like the Bavarian emperor Ludwig II, known as the Fairytale King for his altar-boy look and frizzy curls. There is another spin-off that some of his teammates bestowed the name after a photograph with the bust of former Austrian emperor Franz-Joseph Kaiser.

A more practical tale goes that he, when playing for Bayern Munich, once fiercely marked Schalke’s attacker Reinhard Libuda, who was then known as the King of Westfalen, that his teammates began to