"How to Bayern in 11 Steps"

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It’s a simple story, really: Boy grows up a fan of a big-city team nearby. Boy turns into a star youth player. Boy plays an Under-14 tournament game against his favorite club’s youth team. Boy gets into a scrap with an opposing player. They bump each other and play physically all game. Late in the match, the boy goes in a little late with a little hard tackle. The opposing player jumps up and slaps him in the face. Boy decides he’s going to play for the other team in town.

As Uli Hesse put it in Tor! The Story of German Football, nobody knows who the junior player was, “which is perhaps for the best, because his loss of self-control has had such far-reaching effects that the wrongdoer would certainly still be shunned by a great portion of the football world if we knew who he was.” But young Beckenbauer, long a fan of Munich’s working-class 1860 München squad, decided he couldn’t play for any club that allowed such thuggery. So he signed with Bayern in 1959 and convinced his friends to do the same.

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Here’s what failure looks like at Bayern: When Klinsmann was released from his contract late in the 2008-09 season, not quite to the end of his first season in charge, he had won 25 contests and lost 10 with a goal differential of plus-46. In league play, he had 16 wins to seven losses, and Bayern were just three points out of first place when he was sacked. Die Roten had outscored Sporting CP, 12-1, in the Champions League’s first knockout round before falling by a cumulative 5-1 to eventual champion Barcelona (coached by Pep Guardiola) in the quarterfinals. Granted, there was a semi-early loss in the DFB-Pokal (4-2 at Bayer Leverkusen in the quarterfinals), but these results actually aren’t too shabby. And really, results weren’t at the heart of his dismissal.

“If you think about Germany as a country — conservatism vs. progressivism in the culture and within the regions of the country — Bayern and Bavaria,” says Anderson, “it’s the South. It’s conservative. It was originally deeply Catholic. ‘We know what we’re doing, we do things a certain way, we don’t mess with it.’ And because it’s football, they’re probably even more conservative. They didn’t want to change too quickly. But they needed to change if they were going to keep pace with the other big European clubs.”

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Hamburger SV became a power in the late-1970s, winning three league titles and, beginning in 1979, finishing either first or second for six consecutive years. Between January 1982 and January 1983, they either won or tied 36 consecutive league matches, a record unbeaten streak that was finally topped by (guess who?) Bayern in 2013. In 1983, they beat Juventus, 1-0, to win the European Cup (now the Champions League).

But since finishing fifth in 1991, die Rothosen (the Red Shorts) have managed only six top-five finishes in 24 seasons and have finished 15th or worse in three of the last four.

“It’s politics,” Anderson says. “Hamburg is a great city, a wealthy city. They’ve got a beautiful stadium. But the people running the club are running against each other and working across purposes inside the club. And coming in there from the outside as a coach or GM or anyone else, it is very difficult to get anything done.”

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