Winding paths of money and the explosive Warner contract
The fact is: a lot of money flowed around the world before and after the award. The former Adidas boss Robert Louis-Dreyfus loaned the organizing committee around Beckenbauer a sum of ten million Swiss francs, reported “Der Spiegel”. They ultimately ended up in Qatar via winding paths, with former Qatari football official Mohammad bin Hammam at the end of the chain.
In addition, an internal DFB investigation found a draft contract from shortly before the World Cup was awarded, on which, according to the DFB, Beckenbauer’s signature was found. In the draft, football official Jack Warner from Trinidad and Tobago, who was involved in the award, was promised services such as 1,000 World Cup tickets in the most expensive category, according to “Spiegel”.
“Without Franz we wouldn’t have gotten so many votes. Yes, damn it, what major event hasn’t been bought in the last few years?” said his former companion Paul Breitner indignantly in the ARD film “The Fall of the Kaiser” in 2017. Outside the football cosmos, however, the number of critics grew.
Beckenbauer: “I always signed blindly”
Beckenbauer himself withdrew during this time and only gave a page-long interview to the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. One sentence about the Werner contract remained in the collective memory: “I always signed blindly.”
He explained it like this: “Do you know what I signed back then? Thousands of letters, thousands of declarations, thousands of agreements. I always simply signed everything, I even signed blankly. I wasn’t just traveling for the World Cup, “I also had something else to do. I was president of FC Bayern, I had all my sponsors, I had my television appearances. That meant I sometimes traveled over 300 days a year.”
Louis-Dreyfus gets his money back from the World Cup organizer
Beckenbauer avoided possible charges by the Swiss Federal Prosecutor’s Office in 2019 due to a certificate from his doctors. Two years later, the world football association did not open proceedings against Beckenbauer because the possible acts of corruption were already statute-barred at the time.
Louis-Dreyfus, who died in 2009, only got his money back in 2005 – but from the World Cup organizer, who in turn had received the money from FIFA: “declared as a subsidy for a World Cup gala that never took place,” is how they found it “Süddeutsche Zeitung” out.
Voluntary work as World Cup OK boss is paid
Beckenbauer’s credibility also suffered further dents. He was morally criticized for receiving compensation for his work as OC boss, which was publicly declared to be voluntary: a total of 5.5 million euros from the sports betting provider Oddset.
Uli Hoeneß, Joachim Löw and all the other football experts are right: Franz Beckenbauer was the one who made the summer fairy tale in Germany possible. The former top German politicians Otto Schily, Wolfgang Schäuble and Joschka Fischer recently defended Franz Beckenbauer in the scandal surrounding the 2006 World Cup in the ARD documentary “Beckenbauer”. He will forever be associated with the radiant World Cup summer of 2006, even the sun showed mercy to “the emperor” and his football people. However, even at this point in time, it still cannot be said with certainty whether the light or the shadow will ultimately predominate in the aftermath of the football tournament.
Franz Beckenbauer died last Sunday at the age of 78.