The DFB record player turns 60
Lothar Matthäus is celebrating his 60th birthday.
© imago images / photo booth
Hardly any other football team has shaped an era as much as Lothar Matthäus. Now he's turning 60 and seems to have ended his life in the gossip columns.
Franz Beckenbauer (75) and Lothar Matthäus (60). After all, two German names can be found in a recently elected "dream team" of football – between icons such as Diego Maradona (1960-2020) or Pelé (80). The best footballers of all time were selected by renowned journalists. Once again, the huge importance that Lothar Matthäus has in the world was shown here. Now the former superstar is 60 years old – and in this country still tiredly smiled at by large parts of the population despite his successes.
There has always been an ambivalent relationship between Germans and their sporting superstars. While in other countries many private misconducts are overlooked and the athletes are sometimes worshiped like gods, in Germany one looks twice as closely and regularly unpacks the magnifying glass. In addition to Lothar Matthäus, Boris Becker (53) can certainly sing a song about this. In recent years, Matthäus has worked his way more and more out of the gossip columns and back into the sports columns – yet he still has the nimbus of the simple-minded Franconia with a preference for younger, Eastern European women.
At Bayern he became a world star
Lothar Herbert Matthäus was born on March 21, 1961 in Erlangen, Central Franconia, and played for 1. FC Herzogenaurach at the age of nine against the ball in a club for the first time. At the age of 18 he played in the German national youth team and soon switched to Borussia Mönchengladbach, where its star finally rose. In 1984 he moved to FC Bayern Munich and developed into one of the best midfielders of his generation. After a four-year stint at Inter Milan, Matthäus returned to Bayern in 1992 and seamlessly built on his successes.
In 2000, at the age of 39, he moved to the New York MetroStars and let his incredible career end there. In the end, Matthäus became world footballer, world champion, European champion, UEFA Cup winner, German champion, Italian champion, DFB cup winner, even scored twice the goal of the year and is still the record national player of the DFB. A record that is second to none … Only winning the Champions League, which at the time was still partly listed as the national champions' cup, was denied him as a major trophy. He was at least twice in the final.
Errors after his active career
After his playing days, Matthäus took the coach's path, which was less successful: After a brief stint at Rapid Vienna, he took over Partizan Belgrade, which he even led into the Champions League. Later he went to Brazil, Hungary, Israel and Bulgaria. Matthäus has not coached a club since 2011 and at times was increasingly out of focus in sports reporting. For the tabloid media, however, Matthäus was still a hit – of course, also through his own fault.
Matthäus is married for the fifth time and in principle always decided to celebrate his marriages in public. In 2014, however, he married the 27-year-old Russian Anastasia Klimko and now lives mostly in Budapest – far away from the German press. With his new wife, Matthäus has once again become the father of a son; the footballer was already a father of three from previous marriages.
Will Lothar Matthäus be the next national coach?
For a few years now, however, Matthäus has been rehabilitated step by step due to his work as an expert for the pay-TV channel Sky. There, Matthew is known to this day for his razor-sharp analyzes and for his eloquent comments. Almost all of his colleagues, whether journalists or athletes, praise his excellent specialist knowledge and, above all, appreciate the fact that he never becomes insulting or presumptuous despite sometimes clear criticism.
This fact brought him into conversation, especially in the last few months, about the successor to Jogi Löw (61) as coach of the German national team. First, his ex-Bayern colleague Mehmet Scholl (50) spoke about this variant, which quickly found numerous supporters such as Ottmar Hitzfeld (72) and others. When asked about this, Matthew said: "I am someone who likes to help." His life plan may look different, but if he got the feeling that he was needed and wanted, this task would be his duty in German football …