Football Germany will never forget Andreas Brehme’s decisive penalty in the 1990 World Cup final in Rome against Argentina, when the native of Hamburg took responsibility for an entire nation – and made Germany world champions. The legend passed away last night.
It was just a snapshot, but in the photo from October 2020, when the 1990 German soccer world champions met in Italy to mark the 30th anniversary of their unforgettable triumph, Andreas Brehme could be seen beaming happily. He always thrived in the company of his colleagues. The picture looked like a painting at the time. 22 men in the Italian evening sun of Tuscany. All world champions. And people. It was these moments that made Andreas Brehme happy. Because with these men around him he had celebrated the greatest success of his life. Together with them he had become a legend.
Review: July 8, 1990, 85th minute of the game, World Cup final in Rome, Germany versus Argentina. Andreas Brehme is at the penalty spot. Minutes earlier, referee Edgardo Codesal had awarded the Germans a penalty after Roberto Sensini brought down Rudi Völler. The Argentinians were shocked and complained energetically. But they still had a real bargaining chip, an ace up their sleeve or between the posts. Their penalty hero Sergio Goycochea was in goal.
The fact that Andy Brehme, of all people, was waiting at the penalty spot for the ball to finally be released was due to an almost crazy circumstance. Because Lothar Matthäus, who had hammered the ball into the box from the 11-meter mark in the quarter-final against Czechoslovakia, had voluntarily decided not to take the penalty at this historic moment. The reason: In the first half, one of the German team’s captain’s shoes broke and he had to change his pair completely.
Rudi Völler’s difficult sentence
And another strange story on the side: the kicks that Matthäus had previously worn were borrowed from him by the Germans’ greatest rival in this final, the Argentine superstar and world champion Diego Armando Maradona, two years earlier at Michel Platini’s farewell game – because he had forgotten his own shoes. Incredible! But you can see that Matthäus had been using this pair for a long time and that’s why his reasoning for letting his friend and teammate Andy Brehme take the penalty no longer sounds quite as adventurous: “You can’t go with new shoes either straight to the opera ball”.
What happened next is legend. Andreas Brehme coolly and casually converted the ball into the bottom left corner. Goycochea had no chance to reach the ball. The fact that the then Inter Milan player sank the ball so calmly and calmly into the Argentinian box in this outstanding situation was not as obvious as it looked and as many football fans still believe today.
Because one thing was exactly the same at this moment as it was seven years before – and back then, as a player for 1. FC Kaiserslautern, Brehme was in a historic game, the Bavarians appeared in blue and yellow jerseys for the first time on the Betzenberg, against Munich goalkeeper Jean-Marie Pfaff failed. And that’s probably mainly because the Belgian national goalkeeper had whispered the following in his ear immediately before it was taken: “I’ll save it now. You can’t win against us with a wrong penalty like that!”
And now Andy Brehme found himself unexpectedly and lonely at the penalty spot in the Olympic Stadium in Rome in the World Cup final. And what did his teammate Rudi Völler do? In the middle of the wildest tumult of the Argentinians around the two of them, Völler came to Brehme’s side and, conspiratorially and seriously, breathed into his ear the sentence that was extremely clever and, in this extremely stressful situation, so terribly mean: “Andy, if you clean it up, we are World Champion.”
Heartbreaking scenes after the descent
This time, however, the Hamburg native didn’t allow himself to be thrown off course and in a certain way decided the rest of his life and career in that moment. Because when Brehme was supposed to become coach of 1. FC Kaiserslautern a few years later, Lautern’s then president Jürgen Friedrich said: “Anyone who can take a penalty can also become a good coach.” Unfortunately, that was a misunderstanding. His foray into coaching did not last long and, above all, it was not successful. Andreas Brehme often had difficulties in life after the triumph of Rome. The memories of bygone times were all the more beautiful and greater.
Because Brehme had another special story connected to Völler that deeply moved football Germany. In the 1995/96 season there was a memorable relegation final between Bayer Leverkusen and 1. FC Kaiserslautern in the Bundesliga basement. Eight minutes before the end, Markus Münch, in his last game for Leverkusen, scored the most important goal of his career. It was the 1-1 equalizer that saved Bayer and promoted Lautern to the second division. It was the final low point of a season that Andreas Brehme would later describe as “the bitterest disappointment of my career”.
After the encounter, there were heartbreaking scenes in the TV studio of “Premiere” when Lautern’s Andreas Brehme shed bitter tears of relegation pain in the arms of his world champion colleague and friend Rudi Völler live in front of an audience of millions. It is one of the most unforgettable images in Bundesliga history! Brehme was inconsolable at the time, but he was not ashamed of his tears. Only when his trainer Eckhard Krautzun arrived did Brehme blow his nose and, with a stuffy nose and a tear-choked voice, speak some difficult-to-understand words into the microphone. Rudi Völler, who played the last game of his career that day, held Brehme comfortingly in his arms the entire time.
For “Mister Reliable” (as not only Rudi Völler called him) it was immediately clear that he would not want to and could not quit as a relegated team: “For the first time in its history, the FCK had to go to the lower house. To all the SV Meppens who there. I felt sorry for the whole Palatinate, football is everything for the people there.”
Andreas Brehme will not be forgotten
What he couldn’t have guessed back then: exactly two years later, not only were the tears more than forgotten, Andreas Brehme was also able to cheer again – and how. Together with 1. FC Kaiserslautern, the newly promoted team achieved the unique miracle of winning the German championship just two years after relegation. Andreas Brehme had already said in the middle of the season: “It would of course be the greatest thing if I could leave with the championship title.” When it actually happened, he was nothing but blissful.
Another thing accompanied Andreas Brehme throughout his life, just like the world championship title: his verbal hits on the crossbar – such as “When the man in black blows his whistle, the referee can’t do anything” or “You have shit on your feet, you have shit on your feet” – have gone into history of German football. What few people know, however, is that Andreas Brehme is also the pioneer of Jürgen “Kobra” Wegmann’s legendary saying (“First we had no luck and then we had bad luck”), when he once put it so beautifully philosophically: “The fact is, “We haven’t won a game with luck this season, we’ve only lost games with bad luck.”
In his final years, things had become significantly quieter around the 1990 world champion. The headlines surrounding the hero of Rome, whom “Hörzu” once described as follows – “Andreas Brehme, who for many years of his career was as a filigree technician as Rambo Stallone was as a character actor” – rarely had anything to do with football anymore. At the beginning of January, Andreas Brehme mourned the death of his friend and trainer Franz Beckenbauer. At the time he said: “I think in heaven he will create a magic triangle with Pelé and Maradona.”
Even though Andreas Brehme died last night, for the fans of the German national team the 1990 world champion is and remains immortal. The whole of Germany will never forget this one moment when he took responsibility for an entire nation and sank the decisive penalty for the World Cup title in the Argentine goalkeeper’s box. Last night Andreas Brehme died of a cardiac arrest in Munich at the age of 63.