Uli Hoeneß still determines the fortunes at the record champion from the background. As over all the decades, it remains controversial. His most difficult time shaped him.
If you want to record it with Uli Hoeneß, you have to know exactly what he is getting into. The journalist Max-Jacob Ost quickly felt this, who set itself the task of tracing Hoeneß’s life in a podcast in 2018. His plan was to produce eleven episodes under the title “11 Life”. He failed. In the end it was 17, the length of which quickly exploded from 45 minutes to 192. The project could therefore have been renamed “17 Life” without further ado.
Why? “World champion, European champion, sports investment, youngest manager of the league, title collector, benefactor, tax evader, idol, hate figure, only survivor of an aircraft crash, millionaire and prison inmate. There are Netflix series in which less happens,” says Ost right at the beginning of the first Consequence. He only describes some of the numerous roles that Hoeneß has already played in his eventful life. In the meantime, a few more have been added. Above all, however, one has always remained: the role as a club patron of FC Bayern is undoubtedly still his main and parade role, in which everyone knows him.
There is a lot of data that plays a special role for Hoeneß, but several are piling up in February. On February 29, 2016, he was released from the prison in Landsberg, in which he had been sitting for a year and a half for tax evasion. Hoeneß should be quite right that he is only reminded of this inglorious chapter of his life every four years in the leap years. “Time in prison shaped me,” he said in the T-Online interview: “I think that I have become a person who is more approaching others who has become humble.” He described his tax offense as the greatest mistake of his career. With that he “hurt FC Bayern tremendously”.
On February 17th, the crash of a private aircraft, which Hoeneß was the only one of the four passengers, survived for the 43rd time. He doesn’t know exactly why he survived. He no longer has memories of the tragic misfortune, there are no eyewitnesses. Hoeneß had slept in the back of the aircraft – that probably saved his life.
At the end of February, he inevitably catches up with another date, and this year very special. On February 27, FC Bayern celebrates its 125th birthday. In 1900 the club was founded in the Café Gisela in Munich – of course by exactly eleven men who came together at the time. The only 73 -year -old Hoeneß was not yet part of it. FC Bayern is still his baby, which has grown into a giant under his eyes and leadership in the past decades.
Nobody has shaped the club as Hoeneß has done it as a player, manager and president for 55 years now – and still does as an honorary president and member of the supervisory board. FC Bayern is no less than its life’s work. There are many other great personalities who have shaped the club together with him as a player and responsible-such as Franz Beckenbauer, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge or striker Gerd Müller. Above all, it was Hoeneß who made the German record champion what he is today: a world club, a kicking group.
In 1970 Hoeneß, as an ambitious young player from SSV Ulm, switched to FC Bayern with Paul Breitner at the same time with Paul Breitner. There the two challenged the established stars such as Beckenbauer, Müller or Sepp Maier. Two years later, Hoeneß won the bronze medal at the Olympic Games in Munich.