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Football world champion Thomas Berthold: lateral thinker or troublemaker?

2020-08-09T14:43:27.409Z


Thomas Berthold was once world champion in football - and is now in the headlines because of his speech at the Stuttgart anti-corona demo. Even as a professional, he always likes to be infected.


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Thomas Berthold, here as a TV expert: Critical to provocative interviews on the state of German football

Photo: imago sportfotodienst / imago images / Hartenfelser

Thomas Berthold is used to anger, and you can say that he likes to have his part in it himself. The now 55-year-old, who is now in the headlines because of his speech at the "lateral thinking" demonstration in Stuttgart, is also infected as a footballer, and not just once. Berthold is world champion, he has an impressive 18 World Cup games in his statistics, he is a 62-time national player and DFB Cup winner - most people still remember him as the "highest paid golfer" in German football.

It is the story of Thomas Berthold's involvement with Bayern Munich between 1991 and 1993 that earned him this title. Although you have to be a little careful with the word commitment. Berthold, who moved from AS Roma to Munich at the time, quickly got into an argument with the then Bayern coach Erich Ribbeck and then defiantly sat in the stands for most of his contract term - and is said to have played more golf than football in the meantime. This ridicule is certain to this day on Säbener Strasse in Munich. The then Bayern treasurer Kurt Hegerich was responsible for the label "best paid golfer according to Bernhard Langer".

Thomas Berthold (top left) became world champion with the DFB-Elf in 1990

Photo: Martina Hellmann / picture-alliance / dpa

Back then, Berthold was still in his prime footballer years. It wasn't long ago that he became world champion in Italy in 1990 alongside Lothar Matthäus, Rudi Völler, Jürgen Klinsmann, Andreas Brehme and Co. He had even more in common with Matthäus, Völler, Klinsmann and Brehme: Like the other four, he, the Frankfurt boy, had accepted the call from Italy at the end of the 1980s. German professionals were very popular in Serie A back then. Berthold first played two years for Hellas Verona, then two seasons for AS Roma, before he moved back to Germany - for that unfortunate engagement in Munich.

The DFB career was over after an interview

He was more successful in sport afterwards at VfB Stuttgart. With five referrals he also secured the club record for VfB, but thanks to strong performances he recommended himself again for the national team after a long break, playing through all of the DFB-Elf's games from the first to the last minute at the 1994 World Cup. Then he built it himself again. After the World Cup, he gave an interview in SPIEGEL in which he criticized the national coach Berti Vogts as "too dogged". Criticism of the national coach - at the DFB that was synonymous with the end of a career as a national player.

The career of the then young Eintracht professional took off in 1985 with his first international match, in that year he also scored his only international goal against the CSSR. A year later, under Franz Beckenbauer, he was already a member of the World Cup tournament in Mexico. The hand cuff that Berthold wore at the time is also one of the devotional items in German football. Not only because Berthold beat Mexico in the quarterfinals and saw the red card for it.

Lateral thinker, lateral head or just a troublemaker - that always remained open at Berthold, both as a player and after completing his professional career. Berthold fared like many of his world champion colleagues from 1990, who were outstanding footballers, but were at least unhappy when trying to gain a foothold in the football business. Berthold has two years as manager of Fortuna Düsseldorf. It is not the years that go down in the gold chronicle of the club's history.

Advertising for coconut products

Instead, he hired himself repeatedly and to this day as a TV expert, advertising organic coconut products, taking advantage of the popularity of a world champion. In between he spoke up with critical to provocative interviews about the state of German football. In a conversation in 2007 with the magazine "11 Freunde", he said under the telling headline "It's all the same mustard", sentences like: "We have been going around in circles here in Germany for years. It's always the same soup that swims around here . " And: "The types simply die out because many personalities are simply suppressed." There is no doubt that Berthold always thought of himself as one of the remaining rare types.

Thomas Berthold in the VfB jersey with referee Franz-Xaver Wack: Only one warning every day

Photo: Michael Kienzler / Bongarts / Getty Images

With the speech in Stuttgart, however, the ex-professional went one step further. As a conspiracy theorist, he had not necessarily attracted attention so far, even if many years ago he called a book his "favorite specialist book" that was already indexed because of anti-Semitism and sedition. The story comes up again now, the internet doesn't forget anything.

And one more sentence has now caught up with him. In that interview with "11 Freunde", when asked why changes in German football are so difficult, Berthold said: "Everyone would croak, that's typically German."

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Source: spiegel

All sports articles on 2020-08-09

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