Football legend Gerd Müller
Photo: dpa
Last weekend, when Robert Lewandowski once again scored one goal after the other and struggled to hit Gerd Müller's all-time season record, a little debate broke out on Twitter.
Arose from the question of what would actually be if the Bayern goalscorer voluntarily stopped his activity two match days before the end of the game.
Lewandowski scored an incredible 39 goals after 33 match days. Only one person has managed such a brand in all the Bundesliga decades: the great, the unrivaled, the unique Gerd Müller, who scored 40 times for Bayern in the 1971/72 season. It's a record that was so far away for many years that you didn't even think about what would happen if this record was in danger. Then came Lewandowski.
There are still two games to play for Bayern, against SC Freiburg on Saturday and against FC Augsburg on matchday 34.
FC Bayern has already achieved all of its goals for the season or has been forced to tick them off, in the end the team and the media were only concerned with one thing: Will Lewandowski break the record?
And when he is fit, there is actually no one who doubts that he will still succeed.
In case of doubt, he shoots a hand penalty into the goal.
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The 39-goal man Robert Lewandowski
Photo: Alexander Hassenstein / Getty Images
And exactly at this point now this thought, even more a barb - what if Lewandowski were to say at this point:
I voluntarily give up the record. To bow to the greatest goalscorer that this club, for whom I am also allowed to play, has ever had. I'm a world footballer, I'm Europe's top scorer, I'm Germany's footballer of the year, I won the Champions League. I leave this one record to Gerd Müller. Because it's Gerd Müller. Because FC Bayern would never be the club it became without Gerd Müller.
Because it would be the boldest, the greatest way to honor this goalscorer.
And if it's just a matter of letting a teammate shoot that hand penalty.
An outrageous thought, maybe an absurd one.
It contradicts pretty much everything that defines top football.
This greed for ever new victories, successes, this ever-more.
But if there is a time to express that thought, it is now.
At a time when football has never spoken of humility and respect so often.
No Corona Sunday speech from football officials and players in whom this did not occur.
The counter-argument on Twitter was that something like this was not a sign of size, but of self-dwarfing.
It could be.
But self-dwelling, isn't that just another word for humility?
A voluntary waiver of the record in favor of the memory of the Bayern memorial Gerd Müller - that would make Robert Lewandowski immortal among the fans in Munich.
That would be a story that will be told 50 years from now.
The other is just a number at first.
As I said: it's just a thought.
It won't turn out like that.
But it would be something for the heart.