Gerd Müller
1945 – 2021 · Germany
Known for: Der Bomber: 365 Bundesliga goals and the winner in the 1974 World Cup final
“He turned half chances into history, and a country still counts his goals.”
Biography
Gerd Müller was born on 3 November 1945 in Nördlingen in Bavaria, into a working family in a small town in the ruined years after the war. He joined the youth ranks of his local club, TSV 1861 Nördlingen, in 1958 and was promoted to the first team in 1963, scoring 51 goals in 31 matches in his first season in the Bavarian regional league. That figure brought the scouts, and in the same year, at eighteen, he moved to Bayern Munich, then still playing a division below the Bundesliga, where Franz Beckenbauer and Sepp Maier were waiting for him. He was short, thickset and unimpressive to look at, and neither his build nor his style resembled that of a classical centre forward. What he had was balance, a low centre of gravity and an instinct for where a loose ball would fall.
Müller scored 365 goals in 427 Bundesliga matches, a league record that has stood since he stopped playing, and he finished as leading scorer in Germany seven times and in Europe twice. With Bayern he won four German championships, four cups, three European Cups in succession, the Cup Winners' Cup and the Intercontinental Cup. In the 1971/72 season he scored 40 league goals, and in 1972/73 he scored 67 in all club competitions. For West Germany he scored 68 goals in 62 games, reaching fifty in only 41 appearances. He was the leading scorer of the 1970 World Cup with ten goals and was named European Footballer of the Year that season; in 1972 he won the European Championship and scored twice in the final; in 1974 he scored the winning goal against the Netherlands in the World Cup final in Munich and then, at twenty-eight, left the national team.
He played on at Bayern until 1979 and then spent three seasons with the Fort Lauderdale Strikers in the North American Soccer League, scoring 38 goals and reaching the league final in 1980. Retirement in 1981 went badly: he lost his footing and fell into alcoholism, until former teammates at Bayern persuaded him into treatment and afterwards gave him work coaching the club's second team, a post he held from 1992 until ill health ended it in 2014. His record of 14 World Cup goals lasted 32 years. In 2008 the sports ground in Nördlingen where he had begun was renamed the Gerd-Müller-Stadion. In 2015 it was announced that he had Alzheimer's disease, and he died in a nursing home at Wolfratshausen on 15 August 2021, aged 75.