Football's Most Precious Collection

If you've scored in the World Cup final, please also score at a game I can attend.

It’s a mouthful and it’s unachievable. Seeing live goals by players who’ve scored in the World Cup final is therefore unworthy of obsessive attention. Unless you’re a startlingly healthy 100-year-old millionaire, it’s not a doable list.

But, at half-time in the last match of the 2018 tournament, in Russia of all places, with France leading Croatia 2-1, a total of 57 different players had scored in the World Cup final. That this was the same as the number of Fabergé eggs in existence seemed particularly apt. And not just because those priceless ornaments were created for the Tsars by a craftsman of French heritage (President Putin watched from the executive seats as Antoine Griezmann became Scorer 57).

You can see a Fabergé egg but only the insanely rich get to own one. A goal in the World Cup final is every bit as beautiful and rare yet, while one country and one player will always claim them*, no-one can own what is essentially a fleeting physical action in time. And football, in one of its last democratic acts, can still allow us to experience World Cup final goals more viscerally than any bejeweled orb when we see the very same player score another goal in our presence.

So at full-time in the Brazil 2014 World Cup final I felt particularly denied. Three participants in the Argentina v Germany decider had scored in games I’d previously attended. Germany’s Mario Götze, who netted the only goal at the Maracana that night, wasn’t one of them. My personal collection was stuck at four. But then again they had all come to me - I'd seen them all in Glasgow.

In 1984, aged 15, I paid a fiver to watch Rangers host Internazionale in a UEFA Cup second round, second leg.  The decisive away goal came from Alessandro Altobelli. My teenage devastation later gave way to a feeling of vicarious involvement in the 1982 World Cup final, in which Altobelli scored Italy’s third against Germany.

Karl-Heinz Rummenigge also starred for Inter that night. When he scored against Argentina in the next World Cup final I retrospectively regretted him only hitting the Ibrox post.

Thirty nine years on, just eight countries have won the World Cup. My love of Scotland matches anything any Argentinian or German feels for their national XI. Yet those two have met in the World Cup final three times since Rummenigge struck Rangers old square woodwork; It’ll now be at least 28 years since Scotland even qualified for the tournament. Part of me wants a bigger return on time invested. So I mainline the greats.

Hitting the back of the net in the planet’s most important game isn’t subjective greatness. It’s solid football gold. Seeing such a player score in the flesh is the closest you, I or even most citizens of those World Champion nations will get to FIFA’s showpiece match. 

Andres Iniesta’s first strike for Spain after his winner in the final of South Africa 2010 came in a Euro 2012 qualifier against Scotland. In Hampden’s Main Stand I held my breath when the ball rebounded to him 12 yards out. This wasn’t solely because Scotland were already one down. I was channeling Soccer City, Johannesburg and football’s biggest goal in four years.

It’s not all consolation though. Playing for Olympique Marseille, Rudi Völler scored at Ibrox in a July 1992 friendly. A relaxed home crowd applauded. I thrilled at witnessing a goal by the German who’d made it 2-2 in the Azteca in the Mexico 86 final. But five months later Völler returned, in the Champions League, putting Marseille 2-0 up. This was too much of a rare thing.

UEFA staged the 2002 Champions League final at Hampden. I breathed the same air as Zinedine Zidane’s spectacular winner for Real Madrid, mid-way between his two scoring World Cup finals. 

To augment this collection, however, it seemed I'd have to travel further afield on my treasure hunts.

Desperation to actually attend a World Cup, and the randomness of FIFA’s ticket ballot, found me at the opening game of Germany 2006. Philipp Lahm and Miroslav Klose scored against Costa Rica in Munich. The following year, in the Nou Camp, I saw Lionel Messi score against Rangers in the Champions League group stage. That in 2014 none of these three scored in the World Cup final was only as surprising as some of the 61 who have.

Italy’s Marco Materazzi (2006) and Germany’s Wolfgang Webber (1966) both managed just one other international goal in their playing careers. José Luis Brown’s only goal for Argentina was the opener in that 1986 final. Hector Castro, scorer of Uruguay's winner in the very first final, in 1930, was missing a right forearm.

And sometimes I’ve felt it would have been easier for me to actually score in the final than see live goals by those who have.

Fourteen months after his historic goal in Brazil, Götze showed up at Hampden for a Euro 2016 qualifier. Germany won 3-2 yet, rather than enjoy the consolation of him extending my collection, he had one chalked off for offside and another, which deflected off him into the net, credited to team-mate Thomas Müller.

By the time Rangers drew Borussia Dortmund in the 2021-22 Europa League – at Ibrox I watched the sides share four goals – Götze had left for PSV Eindhoven. When we drew PSV in the Champions League qualifiers six months later, again I attend an Ibrox leg ending 2-2, Götze had left for Eintracht Frankfurt... the side we’d lost to on penalties in the Europa League final in-between times. But I didn't attend that final so, you know, totally not bothered.

When Hampden was selected to host matches at Euro 2020 I successfully purchased a ticket for all four. The Covid afflicted tournament didn’t go ahead til 2021 and crowds in Glasgow were restricted to one quarter of the capacity; everyone had to return half their ticket allocation. Ivan Perišić, scorer of Croatia’s equaliser against France in the 2018 World Cup final, scored in two of these Hampden games. Yup, the two for which I was forced to return my ticket.

However the man who scored next that 2018 day in Moscow’s Luzhniki stadium, France’s Antoine Griezmann, had also scored versus David Moyes’ Real Sociedad when I saw them lose at Atletico’s old Vicente Calderón Stadium during an Easter 2015 holiday in Madrid. And, on 18 December 2022 as the world held its breath, wondering if Messi could negotiate extra time and penalties to finally land himself a World Cup winners’ medal, I already had what I’d sat on the sofa to see:

After 23 minutes of the 22^nd World Cup final, the man I’d witnessed scoring against my club in Barcelona 15 years earlier tucked away a penalty and gave me my Half Dozen. That he’d just become a highly paid ambassador of the murderous Saudi Arabian regime certainly took some of the shine off the moment.

And that day's infamously venal presentation ceremony itself, in a Qatar stadium which caused death and misery to those who built it, had me feeling just a little bit less like a blessed fan of a democratic game than an acolyte of one of those old Russian Tsars who bankrolled Peter Carl Fabergé, despots blythley letting people perish while coveting their little collection of diamond-encrusted eggs.

Football losing its lustre is a middle age thing, yes. But it’s also a realisation we’ve all been coming to for decades now. Eight countries own the World Cup and five own the players who reach its final. If you live outside the homes of those five richest European domestic leagues you might get to see those players in semi-retirement – as long as you reside in Japan, the USA or the gulf states - or watch them wipe the floor with your club in an early stage of the Champions League. 

But, just as it begins to feel like the "glittering jewelry" end of the game is not for the likes of you or me - the people who built it with love, adoration and a conviction it could genuinely illuminate our life - along comes the club I've adored the longest to offer this revolting peasant a flash of ultimate glamour:

An international weekend, of all things, leaves Rangers without a fixture this coming Saturday and Sunday. So, as has become the norm in such circumstances, a select side of "Rangers Legends" will play an "International XI" of equally retired and unfit greats of the global game on the very pitch where I saw my first ever World Cup final scorer score.

I wasn't interested initially. But then an e-mail arrived in my in-box listing both squads. I had to look. And the name that jumped out was one Emmanuel Petit, scorer of the clinching third goal in the 1998 World Cup final and frustratingly - for me - not on the score sheet when I saw him play for France in a 2000 friendly win v Scotland at Hampden. 

Would seeing this guy score, almost twenty years after he retired from playing, in a friendly for retirees, count towards my World Cup Scorers list? 

Not at £18.00 a ticket it won't. Thanks for nothing, Rangers. It'll be Easter soon - I'll use that cash for a deposit on a fancy egg.

*Or two countries and one player in the case of Croatia's Mario Mandžukić who scored for both sides in that 2018 final. Wikipedia claims, to date, that 62 players have scored in the World Cup final but this is only possible if "O.G." is a separate person from poor Mario. After the 2022 final, the total was 61 players.

A (very different) version of this article appeared on the When Saturday Comes website in September 2015.

Forever Gerd

To continue celebrating the life of footballing icon Gerd Müller, who passed away on Sunday after a long illness, here's another of the short pieces I've written about him over the years. This one appeared on the When Saturday Comes website in the first week of September 2013.

It seems almost insultingly trite to mention the great man died on the first Bundesliga weekend of 2021-22 or that Robert Lewandowski finally took his record for a single Bundesliga season, by a single goal, scored in the final minute of the final match in Bayern's final completed league campaign of Der Bomber's life.

But I hope this piece demonstrates such symbolism, perhaps inevitable when a player sets standards as historic as Müller’s, helps guarantee - and celebrate - the legacy of a lovely man with a seminal talent.

  

First Lionel Messi beat his record for goals in a calendar year. Now Gerd Müller’s German international scoring record will be equalled if Miroslav Klose nets in Friday’s World Cup Group C qualifier. The game takes place in Munich, where Müller became a Bayern legend. The opponents are Austria – against who Müller scored a pivotal winner, also in Bavaria, en route to Mexico 1970. Such symbolism is crucial as Müller, a humble man familiar with hardship, is finally feted in a manner commensurate with his achievements.

While chasing down those 85 goals in a year, Messi failed to score against Celta Vigo last November, on Müller’s 67th birthday. Now his most famous record – 68 goals for Germany - is about to go in his 68^th year.  Klose’s first international goal, like Müller’s, came at home to Albania. Both managed 14 goals in World Cup finals tournaments, both have won the World Cup Golden Boot.  Yet Klose is 35 years old, his next international appearance will be his 129th - Müller retired after his 62nd cap, aged 28.

Müller’s  tallies are being caught but it’s questionable whether his stats are being truly equalled, and it’s almost certain his prowess isn’t being matched.  Messi hasn’t won any World Cups or Copa Americas and has a “mere” 35 goals in 82 internationals. Müller has World Cup gold and bronze medals and a European Championship. It took Pippo Inzaghi approximately 40 more games than Müller to equal his 67 goals in all European club competition.

Müller is still regarded as the poacher par excellence, renowned for his phenomenal reactions, killer instinct and unstinting bravery in the box. Yet in his history of German football, Tor! , Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger explains "Der Bomber", probably coined by a British journalist, is the most famous but least appropriate of Müller’s  nicknames.

Post-war xenophobia and footballing jealousy saw him often regarded abroad as clinical in the pejorative sense – coldly merciless. He certainly hated waste, being born into an unfriendly world, just months after Germany lost the Second World War and then quickly losing his father.

But despite 365 goals in the Bundesliga he claims he was always as clueless as the poor goalkeepers about where he’d put the ball. When he ran down his career in the USA he struggled with English, business deals then alcohol - he split from his wife. Müller is one of life’s innocents, a man who lived off his key skill.

His two strikes in the 1974 European Cup final replay against Atletico Madrid  - a long-range lob and a trigonometry-defying volley -  proved he could do  the spectacular. His versatility was proven in the following year’s final against Leeds, when he switched to midfield after Terry Yorath put Bjorn Andersson out the match early on (Müller still scored the winner though).

But the 21st century’s expanded competitions and extended careers have inadvertently instigated a sustained celebration of the game’s greatest ever striker. When Brazil’s Ronaldo scored against Japan in the 2006 World Cup to equal Müller’s finals record, and then against Ghana a few days later to beat it, both games took place at Borussia Dortmund’s Westfalen stadium, yards from where Müller opened his account against Albania in 1967. The symbolism sharpened the comparisons. Ronaldo’s total required an extra tournament and six more finals games.

The more his records are threatened and overhauled, the more valid they become. Arriving at Bayern in 2003, Dutch goal machine Roy Makaay seemed a possible challenger to Müller’s 1971-72 feat of 40 goals in a Bundesliga campaign. The most he managed in any season was 23. 

When Müller set that record his strike partner Uli Hoeness chipped in another 13 goals. This allowed Wolfsburg’s front pairing of Edin Dezeko (26 goals) and Grafite (28) to claim they were the biggest scoring partnership in Bundesliga history at the end of the 2008-09 campaign. Mostly, Müller’s stats are “toppled” tenuously. But he’ll be first to congratulate the topplers.

Update, August 2021: Klose indeed scored Germany's opener in what turned out to be a 3-0 win over Austria that night. He failed to score in his next two appearances for Germany but finally surpassed Müller's total with international goal no. 69 making it 4-1 in a 6-1 friendly win over Armenia, in Mainz, in June 2014.

And Brazilian Ronaldo took Müller's World Cup finals record against Ghana, in Germany? Well, eight years later Klose equalled Ronaldo's record against Ghana in Brazil, and took the overall record back to Deutschland when scoring the second - his sixteenth in World Cup finals and the 71st and final goal of his international career - in Germany's historic 7-1 win over Brazil themselves, on their home patch, in the semi-final.

That'll teach them to mess with a Müller record.

Forever Gerd. Gerd forever.

Supporting Gerd Müller

I found myself delighted when 1FFC Frankfurt striker Célia Šašić grabbed the first hat-trick of the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup finals, in a 10-0 win over Ivory Coast. I loved that the first hat-trick of the 2014 FIFA men’s World Cup was scored by Bayern Munich’s Thomas Müller. Seem like strange things for a Scotsman to remember, far less celebrate. No less so when I explain it's because both wore Germany’s number 13 - the shirt made famous by Bayern legend Gerd Müller, now aged 75.

When, in October 2015, it was announced Müller was suffering from Alzheimer’s, German football rallied round arguably the greatest striker the game has known. Following those who inherit his shirt is just one of the tenuous ways I’ve always supported “Der Bomber”, who retired from international football 41 years ago, as I turned 5.

Growing up as Scotland’s World Cup failures went from heroic to comedic and VHS tapes of football history proliferated, Germany’s tournament consistency became a stolen security blanket, Müller’s stats and story a self-help book for young adulthood.

Derided by his first Bayern Munich coach as “the short fat Miller”, he became 1970 European Footballer of the Year through close-range scoring.  He would go on to score 365 goals in 427 Bundesliga matches for Bayern. So being classed “a lazy, poaching git” wouldn’t shame me out my teenage place in a Sunday league team.

The humble stoicism of die Nationalmannschaft was also, for me, the perfect antidote to Scotland’s extremes of international arrogance and insecurity. We capped dishevelled alcoholic geniuses apparently predestined for Culloden-esque hubris. Yet squat, inelegant Müller - fond of a bevvy and representing a nation universally unforgiven for a war which ended the year he was born - scored the winner in the final of the World Cup, European Championships and European Cup

My dad saw him score against Scotland at Hampden, my uncle against Rangers at Ibrox. While his is the only autograph I’ve ever hunted (obtained outside Glasgow City chambers in 2002), I never saw him play. Yet when Brazil’s Luís Antônio Corrêa da Costa put Scotland out the 1990 World Cup with both a strike and nickname connoting 1940s Bavaria, I knew the original “Müller’s” career would always be visceral to me.

Holland’s Marco van Basten, needing one to beat Müller’s record of 16 European Championship goals, couldn’t score throughout Euro 92. When he missed in the semi-final shoot-out against Denmark I was off the sofa, delighted he couldn’t even claim a tie-breaker.

Peter Schmeichel was still in goals for Denmark four years later when Croatia’s Davor Suker, who would reach 20 during the Euro 2000 qualifiers, equalled Müller’s record with a famous chip at Hillsborough. Sheffield “neutrals” asked Manchester United’s Schmeichel the score. I sat among them, in that high uncovered corner between the Leppings Lane End and the North Stand, knowing it was 16 each.

In 2006 I supped tea-time pints in the pub nearest my work, masochistically watching Brazil’s Ronaldo equal then overtake Gerdy’s record of 14 World Cup finals goals: His two against Japan and one versus Ghana were scored at Dortmund’s Westfalenstadion, adjacent to the Stadion Rote Erde, the site of Müller’s first international goal (and his second, third and fourth – all in the same 1968 Euros qualifier versus Albania). So it was worth waiting eight years to see Miroslav Klose reclaim that record for Germany on Brazilian soil – his fifteenth against Ghana, his sixteenth in the 7-1 rout of the hosts. 

Klose, because of that record; the Faroe Islands’ Jan Allan Müller because of his surname; and Thomas Müller because he has the surname, squad number, Champions League winners medal with Bayern and World Cup Golden Shoe:  I’ve loved seeing these players score live, simply because of their varyingly direct links with my retrospective hero.

The namesakes I saw scoring against my country at Hampden. Those 2006 post-work pints used up the last of the money I had left from travelling to Munich for the opening match and ceremony of that World Cup. Klose got a brace - two of his eventual record tally – in a 4-2 win over Costa Rica. The ceremony which preceded it saw Müller on the pitch. At Bayern’s new home ground. It was like a passing of the flame.

What’s happened since, with Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi taking goal-scoring to cartoon levels, exists in a world and game unrecognisable from the one of my day – when defenders could and would kick you to pieces - far less that of the striker they called Der Bomber. Messi and Ronaldo have their records, their Ballons d’Or and their Champions Leagues. But they have one international winner’s medal between them and it’s not for the FIFA World Cup, the final of which neither has scored in.

Müller shouted, “Ich bin Max Morlock,” while playing as a kid. 1FC Nuremberg’s Morlock, wearing 13, scored Germany’s opener in their triumphant 1954 World Cup final. When they next won a World Cup, in 1974, Müller scored the winner – his 68^th goal in his 62^nd and final match for his country - wearing his hero’s number. It embodies the beautiful memories he’s provided for millions that, four decades later, middle-aged Scotsmen could still be seen waddling round Glasgow five-a-side courts, hailing every jammy sklaff from three yards with, “I am Gerd Müller!”