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Günter Netzer, puller, first on, then next to the square
Photo: Sebastian Gollnow / picture alliance / dpa
You can say that Günter Netzer started small.
So there is the story that little Günter, the son of the owner of a corner shop in Mönchengladbach's old town, bribed his classmates with sweets from his parents' shop so that they could have him written off.
Netzer liked and often told the anecdote himself, it is in his autobiography.
That too belongs to Günter Netzer and what has set him apart from many others in the industry: that he likes to flirt with his little vices and shortcomings.
His father was also a trader, so doing business was in Günter Theodor Netzer's blood, so to speak.
And it has remained something of his second nature.
Netzer was a great playmaker, a puller on the pitch, probably the tenth number ten that existed in German football.
But he was also a puller off the field for many years.
As a footballer, he helped make this sport shine even brighter.
As a businessman, he made his contribution to the dark side of football.
If you will, there have always been two Günter Netzers.
One breathed the libertinage of the big wide world, the freedom of the 1970s.
The flying hair, the depth of space, lover's lane, the disco he ran, Ferrari driver, Playboy, self-substitute in the DFB Cup final.
The coolest guy in German football.
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Günter Netzer and Gerhard Delling, awarded here with the "Golden Hen"
Photo:
DPA
Add to this the elegance and eloquence with which he even managed to break up the TV expert genre, which is so boring in Germany, and give him a radiance of entertainment and humor.
Delling and Netzer - there should have been people who watched football games on television mainly because of the dialogues between the two.
Decorated with the Grimme Prize, ridiculed by Franz Beckenbauer as the Brothers Grimm Prize.
Made sure he didn't miss out
The other Günter Netzer was the one who always made sure that he didn't miss out.
From childhood, so to speak, as the story with the sweets shows.
Even as a young professional in Mönchengladbach he provided one or the other side job.
By managing the stadium newspaper because he felt like he was underpaid as a footballer.
Who also worked as an insurance agent: "So I drove through the area with the broker and had insurance talks in living rooms and kitchens, although I had no idea about insurance," he told the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in a major interview last year: " Three thousand marks a month.
Nice extra income, I thought. "
Netzer soon changed the state of feeling underpaid as a footballer.
"On Saturday there will be eleven business people on the pitch, each of whom represents his own interests" was his view of professional football early on: "I was probably the first in Germany to speak out so openly," he writes in his biography.
He has often been called avant-garde, revolutionary, pop star because of his appearance, but he never was, he never wanted to be.
Rather, it was the time when you ran around so cool, and Netzer owed his extravagant clothes more to his girlfriend at the time, Hannelore Girrulat, than to any rebel attitude.
Netzer in 1973 in Real Madrid jersey
Photo: Keystone / Getty Images
After his move from Mönchengladbach to Madrid, he signed a contract with Real President Santiago Bernabéu, even more mythical than Netzer himself, where he earned 295,000 marks a month more than any other German professional at the time.
When he later worked as a manager for Hamburger SV in its heyday, he landed an offer from a Swiss entrepreneur for perimeter advertising for the club.
The manager pushed the deal through, and HSV earned a lot.
It was the beginning of a wonderful business friendship for Netzer.
The Swiss entrepreneur was called César W. Lüthi, and Günter Netzer became his closest partner in the following years.
Instinct and intuition
Lüthi accepted him into his sports marketing company, CWL, named after his initials, and now the money-making business for businessman Günter Netzer was only really picking up speed.
Sports marketing was still a future business in the 1980s, Lüthi suspected how much money you could make with it: first perimeter advertising, then TV rights, and Netzer with his connections, Netzer with his business acumen, Netzer with his charm, he was the perfect one Sherpa for Lüthi.
"What was always there with me: instinct and intuition to a great extent," Netzer told the "NZZ".
And that instinct was needed now.
Football is a business where you can put in and take out infinite amounts of money.
Netzer understood this early on, and again he was the playmaker.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Lüthi and Netzer rolled up Eastern Europe, secured the marketing rights with up to 50 clubs, the CWL became bigger, so big that the media mogul Leo Kirch turned his attention to the Swiss company.
Kirch joined CWL, and from now on Netzer was in big business.
TV rights, the booming football market, the biggest price driver and particle accelerator that the industry had and has.
A hot market, a competitive market, a market in which the football officials had a say - and held their hands.
Football became the big self-service store, and it was no longer about candy.
Netzer was one of the winners among the winners.
The great Leo Kirch had at some point lost his mind, all his behind-the-scenes play with politics and functionaries had not helped him, the empire went bankrupt, Netzer and his company Infront stayed, he and his business partners obtained the necessary start-up capital to take the marketing of the television rights into their own hands.
Netzer had once again successfully substituted himself in.
You know each other in football
The rope team, deeply entangled with one another, between Fifa, Uefa, DFB and Infront, has been around for a long time.
Linked through ingenious contract architectures, constantly renewed and reinforced on a personal level.
You know each other in football, sometimes for 30 years.
Infront and the Fifa of ex-President Joseph Blatter, the shrewdest intrigues player in the industry, are based in little Switzerland, you meet, you meet, at gala events, in the grandstand, in the VIP lounge, for dinner.
Netzer and Infront took advantage of all of this, you could also say they used it.
Netzer invited the then DFB boss Wolfgang Niersbach to a luxury yacht in the Mediterranean, allegedly only a friendship service for the 70th birthday of the former soccer star, the son of the former DFB general secretary Helmut Sandrock got a job at Infront.
There is a recording of a talk show from 2014 on Youtube, Netzer is a guest there and with him Niersbach, who a year later stumbled upon the summer fairy tale revelations of SPIEGEL and whose association had close business relationships with Netzer company Infront for many years.
Netzer tells in his typically teasing way, with his feigned bad temper, how things went at the DFB when they tried to host the 2006 home World Cup.
Today the recording is almost a contemporary document, a TV moral painting.
Netzer says about the application tour of the German organizing committee: »Application tour?
I call it pleasure trip.
They didn't fly economy, first class, and when things got a little difficult they took jets. "
Netzer continues: »The evenings after the application were quite legendary.
The DFB treasurer did not know that there were two or three hundred mark cigars, that there were red wine, at the thousand mark mark.
But he had to approve of everything. «Big booing in the audience, Niersbach smiles jovially, the moderator bends with laughter, laughter, thigh knocks, thunderous applause.
That's how it was back then, that was just six years ago, and, what is perhaps the worst part of the matter: Nobody thought anything about it.
Everyone believed it was their right.
Take everything you can get with you.
The Beckenbauers, the Netzers.
For many years they were celebrated for this, and for years the audience applauded them.
In Netzer's autobiography there is the sentence: "Forget all that fuss with the eleven friends on the football field, that's Kokolores." The money is obviously not Kokolores for Netzer.
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