Image Credit– dfb.de
Italia ’90 was a special time for the Irish. Though I wasn’t even an idea by that point, I’ve been told enough times about it to know that, for many, it was the highlight of their lives. For many West Germans, this is also the case. In the same year that the Berlin Wall officially began demolition, West Germany won their last competition as a nation separate from the East. That competition was the World Cup, a trophy they had won twice before. West Germany had been strong in the group stage but were not as dominant as Brazil or the host nation of Italy, who both had perfect records. This, as it turned out, mattered little as both Brazil and Italy were eliminated by Argentina in the knockout stages. West Germany also made it to the final, which set up a rematch of the final of the previous World Cup, the first time that two consecutive World Cups had the same finalists. In what had been an already low-scoring World Cup, the final kept that trend going, with the West Germans winning 1-0 thanks to a penalty dispatched by Andreas ‘Andy’ Brehme. Many were shocked when Brehme took the penalty because he took it with his, supposedly, weaker right foot. During his playing career, however, Brehme was unique. He was ambidextrous, equally proficient with both feet. This, then, is a career retrospective on one of West Germany’s most important players ever.
Most known for his exploits with the West German national team and with Inter Milan in Italy, Andreas Brehme does not have the same level of reverence that is reserved for Matthäus or Sammer in the world of football, but he is almost as important to German football as them. Known for his distinctive blonde hair, Brehme had an interesting play style that made him stand out among his contemporaries. Not blessed with the electric pace of many modern full backs, Brehme compensated for this with a superb footballing brain. He was multi-positional, excelling in every wide position from full-back to winger, on both flanks, also being capable of playing in defensive or central midfield. However, it was at wing-back that he truly shone, playing mostly down the left channel for the German and West German national sides. His versatility and high football IQ meant he excelled as part of tactical systems and could perform in multiple roles and positions over the course of a single game. His genuine ambidexterity made him stand out in world football and meant that he was equally comfortable on either side of the pitch, but mainly played down the left. This ambidexterity made him very difficult to defend against or read and affected his other skills, it made him a set-piece specialist and a superb crosser of the ball. Proficient over free kicks and penalties, he took free kicks and corners mostly with his left foot but penalties, more often than not, with his right. According to the man himself, he found his right foot more accurate and his left more powerful. His fierce power meant that he had a thunderous strike and could swerve in extremely dangerous crosses to his forwards. He scored many goals from long range and was known to have excellent stamina. In his prime, he was considered one of the best, if not the best, free kick takers and crossers in world football. He could be left wanting defensively upon occasion, which many would argue was his main job, but his other qualities made up for his deficiencies in this area. A, “big game player”, he often scored in the most pressurised games on the grandest stages and, later in his career, developed into a leader, occasionally captaining his nation and becoming Kaiserslautern’s club captain.
Born in Hamburg in 1960, Brehme did not come to top level soccer in the traditional way. He wasn’t picked up at 5 or 6 years old by an elite club’s academy, but by local club HSV Barmbek-Uhlenhorst. A player that reached the level of Brehme would be expected to have been hoovered up by Hamburg’s dominant side at the time, Hamburger SV, but this never happened. Instead, Brehme did it the hard way and worked his way up through clubs and divisions to, eventually, reach the pinnacle of world football. Having remained at HSV Barmbek-Uhlenhorst all the way up to senior level, Brehme began his professional career there before earning a transfer to 2. Bundesliga side 1. FC Saarbrücken after two seasons. He didn’t last long in Saarland, as he was on the move again after only one season to the dizzying heights of the Bundesliga with 1. FC Kaiserslautern.
Die roten Teufel would prove to be where the ambidextrous German’s career really took off. The talented Hamburger would go on to spend a total of 10 seasons at Kaiserslautern between two separate 5 season spells at the club. Brehme didn’t win a single trophy in his first stint in the Rhineland-Palatinate region, but his displays caught the eyes of many suitors and helped him break into the German national team. While often a seemingly overlooked time in his career, in the sphere of online info anyway, Brehme’s first stint with The Red Devils (not the ones in Manchester) cannot be ignored or swept aside. It was the time when he came to the fore and began displaying his talent at the highest level. By personal statistics, his most successful period was between 1981-1986 for Kaiserslautern. He played a minimum of 34 games per season in all competitions in every season during that time, his goal output reached double figures for the 84/85 and 85/86 seasons and the former of those was his best single season for goalscoring of his entire career. With the subsequent rise of top-level defenders with goalscoring ability, Brehme’s numbers may seem good but not exceptional to most. However, this is where most are wrong, as Brehme was an early part of a subsequent explosion of goalscoring defensive players. These players can credit part of the attacking license they were given to the likes of the great Giacinto Facchetti and to Brehme’s fellow German, Der Kaiser himself, Franz Beckenbauer.
I’ll permit myself a small tangent here; up until the displays of players like Facchetti and particularly Beckenbauer, European clubs and nations operated much more rigid defensive structures than their South American counterparts. Yes, there were fluid teams like the Austrian Wunderteam and the Hungarian Golden Team that had players comfortable all over the pitch, but their ideals didn’t really spread through the continent for a while. The reason they are both noted as such brilliant and important teams is because of their quality and how different they were to everything else around them at the time. The Wunderteam dominated part of the 1930s to such an extent, that it took World War II and the annexation of Austria to stop them. The Hungarian Golden Team, or Aranycsapat, were the heavy favourites to win the 1954 FIFA World Cup AND defeated England 7-1 in the build up to that tournament. While Hungary have retained their hold over the English, with 4-0 and 1-0 victories over the Three Lions in recent years shocking the world, no one would have them as favourites to win a World Cup nowadays. These teams of the past brought attacking football to the fore, the reason they are remembered is because most other European soccer was rigid, defensive, and structured. Teams remained in formation and position. They man-marked and hacked players down if they showed invention or flair. Players were not individuals but part of the system, not too dissimilar to the current day Premier League. This changed, particularly with Beckenbauer, in the 60s & 70s. Der Kaiser was positionally fluid and could make powerful, barnstorming runs from defence that ended with him putting the ball in the back of the net on over 100 occasions in the professional game. This kind of thing wasn’t common, which explains his 2 wins and 2 second place finishes in the Ballon d’Or between 1972 and 1976, with a third-place finish in 1966 thrown in for good measure. Beckenbauer put attacking defenders on the world stage, and it started a wave of players coming through with license to venture forward from the back. The likes of Koeman, Hierro, Sergio Ramos, and our man Brehme would not have had the careers they did without Beckenbauer’s Ballon d’Or wins. They were other attacking defenders, especially in South America but they didn’t influence the European game like Der Kaiser did.
Back at Kaiserslautern, Brehme was called up the West Germany national team in 1984 by Jupp Derwall and was part of the 1984 UEFA Euro Squad that crashed out in the group stage, albeit after giving a good account of themselves. This wouldn’t be held against Brehme though, as he retained his spot in the squad after Franz Beckenbauer took over as manager of the national team after that exit from the Euros. Brehme remained in the national setup for a full decade, until 1994, after the first ever unified German national team were knocked out of the 1994 World Cup quarter-finals by Hristo Stoichkov’s Bulgaria.
In 1986, the inevitable happened for Brehme. Due to the quality of his displays for FCK and West Germany, in both defence and midfield, Bayern Munich came calling for Brehme. After receiving a runners-up medal at the 1986 FIFA World Cup, the versatile defender was drawn in by the German talent hoover that is FC Bayern. As the reigning German champions, both now and at the time, Bayern boasted the likes of Lothar Matthäus, Klaus Augenthaler, and both the younger Rummenigge and Hoeneß brothers. In his first season at FCB, Brehme picked up a Bundesliga title and, in his second, a DFL-Supercup. Things probably looked like they were being set up for a dynasty of dominance, even with Dieter Hoeneß being in his twilight years. However, failure to win a trophy more significant than the Supercup in 1987/88, meant that the squad dissolved. Hoeneß had retired as a champion at the end of the1986/87 season, Michael Rummenigge departed for Borussia Dortmund in 1988, with Brehme and Matthäus both moving to Inter Milan in that same year. Bayern would return to league winning ways in 1989 after those departures, but there will always be a sense of what could have been.
Inter Milan proved to be the most recognised part of Brehme’s club career. A simple Google search for ‘Andreas Brehme’ will mostly bring up images of his national team exploits and his time at the Nerazzurri. Moving from Bayern Munich to Internazionale in a double signing with teammate Matthäus, they would be joined by compatriot Jürgen Klinsmann in the following season. Some of Brehme’s best club football was played in Italy. He won the Scudetto in his first season at the club, playing in 31 out of 34 league games and making 44 appearances in all competitions in 1988/89, the most of his career. Having been known as a free-kick and penalty specialist from his goalscoring exploits in in his home country, the number of goals he scored notably tailed off in the über-defensive Italian top-flight. While unable to win another league title in his time at the club, Brehme did claim a Supercoppa Italiana in 1989 and, finally, claimed a European trophy in 1990/91 with the UEFA Cup. Brehme was in the starting lineup for that final, in which he and compatriots Klinsmann and Matthäus defeated another Italian club, German teammate Rudi Völler’s Roma. Despite the more defensive approach of football in Italy, Brehme was still able to score the occasional worldie, as demonstrated by his cracking strike against Pisa in the 1988/89 season and several free kicks that he took from distance with his left foot, while still taking penalties with his right. Internazionale AKA Inter Milan, would be the last club that Brehme and Matthäus would play for together as the blonde full-back moved to Spain’s La Liga to play for Real Zaragoza for a single season, while Matthäus moved back to Munich.
Brehme’s most successful spell for his national team also came while he was based in Lombardy. Known as a “big game player”, Brehme would often play to the best of his ability at international tournaments for West Germany and, later, a unified Germany. Having made his debut in 1984 for the national team, he would go on to win 86 caps and score 8 goals for his nation, retiring from the national team after a full decade of service in 1994. International soccer would prove to be what Brehme became known for, particularly for ‘that penalty’, in the 1990 FIFA World Cup final. Having broken into the team while at Kaiserslautern, he would become a mainstay of the national side for the entirety of his time representing Die Mannschaft, often coming up with important ‘clutch’ goals in big moments. He was part of the national team for 7 major international tournaments and was in the team of the tournament/All-Star team for 3 of them. The World Cup didn’t reintroduce teams of the tournament/All-Star teams until 1990, the last was in 1938. A runner up at both World Cup 1986 and Euro 1992, a semi-finalist at Euro 1988 and, most importantly, a World Cup winner in 1990, Brehme’s international career was the stuff of dreams for most.
The epoch of Brehme’s career was undoubtedly 1990, a year in which he won the World Cup by surprising the world with his penalty, made the World Cup All-Star team and finished 3rd in Ballon d’Or voting, all in the same year. Backed up expertly by Jürgen Kohler for the whole tournament, Brehme and the West Germans were efficient, as the cliché about Germans goes. Having not lost a game and scored plenty in the group stage, admittedly against some weak opposition, the West Germans only scored 5 and conceded 2 in 4 knockout games. Brehme had been brilliant for the entire competition. He assisted his Inter teammate Klinsmann for a trademark diving header with a fizzed cross against Yugoslavia in the group stage, scored one of the greatest World Cup goals ever on his right foot in the Round of 16 against bitter rivals the Netherlands and scored a deflected free kick in the semi-final against England. All before his crowning moment in the final.
Having been superb since his debut in 1984, Brehme was the deciding factor of the 1990 World Cup final against Argentina. With a chance to avenge the result of the 1986 World Cup final, which saw the West Germans lose 3-2 in the final of a Maradona dominated tournament, the 1990 final was a much cagier affair After 84 uneventful minutes of the final, with the score still 0-0, a dubious penalty was awarded to the West Germans for a ‘foul’ by Argentina centre-back Roberto Sensini in the box. For those who were not regular watchers of Serie A at the time, it seemed insane that Brehme had been taking free-kicks and corners with his left foot at the World Cup but was now stepping up to take the most important penalty of his life with his right. However, despite all of this, Brehme calmly dispatched the spot kick into the bottom left corner of the net and the West Germans only had to hang on for 5 more minutes to be crowned World champions. They managed it and West Germany would see out their existence crowned as the best team in world football. Reunification would see the East German football federation integrated into the DFB in November 1990, albeit the East German national team had basically been defunct since September of that year. Brehme would continue to represent the unified German national team for the next 4 years, appearing at 2 major tournaments. He left the national team setup in 1994 after a quarter-final exit in 1994 World Cup at the hands of Bulgaria.
By 1993, Brehme had won the World Cup, played for two of Europe’s biggest clubs, made a detour through Zaragoza in Spain and being 32 at the time, many would have forgiven him for slowing down at this stage of his career. Of course, he didn’t, instead moving back to the club where he had made his name, 1. FC Kaiserslautern. FCK had finished 8th in the 1992/93 season, a drop of 3 places from the previous season, looking solid but uninspiring. In the 1993/94 season, his first back at the club, they finished 2nd, getting the team back into European competition. Things were looking good for Die roten Teufel and their returning hero as they qualified for the UEFA Cup again the next season. However, things were about to get VERY turbulent for Brehme and his teammates. After consecutive seasons of European qualification, the 1995/96 season would have the highest of highs and the lowest of lows in store for Brehme and FCK.
Having been consistently strong for the previous seasons, Kaiserslautern would finally have some reward for their displays, as they won their first trophy since the DFB-Supercup in 1991. By this point, Brehme was mainly playing in central or defensive midfield, something he was permitted to do by his high footballing IQ but became a requirement as his pace deserted him. By this point, Brehme was 34 years old and would turn 35 in November of 1995, he had retired from international duty and was captain of 1. FCK. Unfortunately, the 1995/96 Bundesliga season was a frustrating one for Kaiserslautern as they finished in 16th place, the third relegation spot. Kaiserslautern only lost 10 games and conceded 37 goals all season, which was actually less goals conceded than eventual champions Borussia Dortmund. However, where the club really fell down was in goalscoring and actually winning games. FCK scored the second lowest number of goals in the entire league that season, only behind SC Freiburg. To be fair, FCK could rightfully feel a bit hard done by, as they only finished 2 points behind 15th place FC St. Pauli with a better goal difference than 3 of the clubs that finished ahead of them. Freiburg, in particular, were quite lucky to finish as high as 11th, having scored only 30 goals and conceded a staggering 41. For context, Kaiserslautern scored 31 goals and conceded 37 goals to have a goal difference of -6. The teams behind them, Eintracht Frankfurt and KFC Uerdingen, finished with -25 and -23, respectively. Frankfurt only finished 4 points behind FCK that season. All of this together, condemned those 3 teams to spending the 1996/97 season in the 2. Bundesliga, the second tier of German football. The one saving grace for this season was Kaiserslautern’s DFB-Pokal triumph in May of 1996.
Requiring extra time to get through the first round of Germany’s equivalent to the FA Cup against Fortuna Köln, Kaiserslautern won every game in the following rounds within the confines of regulation time. Brehme played in 5 of FCK’s 6 games in the competition and was captain of the team for the final against Karlsruher SC. Captaining the opposition was his former international teammate for both West Germany and unified Germany, Thomas ‘Icke’ Häßler, a great attacking midfielder at the time. The final was a cagey affair, as would be the expectation from FCK’s Bundesliga season. Their Pokal exploits had been a bit different though as they scored 14 goals in 6 games, more than 2 per game, a staggering contrast to their league form. Two 1-0 results along their route to the final did show that they could tighten up when they needed to. For the actual final, Brehme and Häßler were the cover stars as two World Cup winning legends would captain the clubs in the final. The final itself proved to be another low scoring fixture as it finished 1-0 to FCK after a 42nd minute goal from wing-back Martin Wagner proved to be the deciding factor of the game. For Brehme, however, that was not where the drama ended as he was sent off for a second yellow card in the 72nd minute of the game, a blemish on an otherwise hugely impressive record.
So, having already been relegated to the 2. Bundesliga, then winning the DFB-Pokal a week later, FCK ended up qualifying for the 1996/97 UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup. Therefore, in an odd turn of events, FCK would be playing in Continental competition while playing in the second division of their domestic league. Normally, when this kind of thing happens, players of Brehme’s status jump ship, finding a top club to keep playing with instead of playing in lower leagues, or players of his age simply retire after an event like this. Brehme, however, was different, he remained at the club while they were in the second division. Elimination from the Cup Winners’ Cup in the first round at the hands of Red Star Belgrade meant that FCK could entirely focus on the 2. Bundesliga, which they certainly did. Powered by the goals of Pavel Kuka and Jürgen Rische, Brehme played 32 league games in the 1996/97 2. Bundesliga season between midfield and defence, captaining the club to a return to the Bundesliga. FCK finished 10 points clear of second place and third placed VFL Wolfsburg and Hertha Berlin, respectively, claiming the 2. Bundesliga, only losing 4 games all season.
Proving to be the springboard that the club needed, Kaiserslautern took the momentum of that title win in the 2. Bundesliga and went on to become the first newly promoted, or in this case repromoted, team to win the Bundesliga. Olaf Marschall proved to be the star in this title win as Brehme was less involved, only playing 5 league games all season. At 37 years old, this proved to be Brehme’s last season as a player, leaving behind a career that most could only dream of. Those last two championships, it could be argued, were probably the sweetest, as they were the most hard fought. A forgettable managerial career followed, after a 2-year hiatus from the game. In 2005 he had a reunion with his old Inter Milan boss, Giovanni Trapattoni, serving as the Italian’s assistant at VFB Stuttgart. Both were sacked in 2006.
Overall, some may argue that Brehme did not have quite the career of someone like his friend Matthäus or Matthias Sammer and is not as celebrated as those individuals, but his quality cannot be denied. Brehme was a significant force in every international tournament he participated in, and he played for some of the best clubs in world football. He won multiple titles and trophies at multiple clubs, created two of the FIFA World Cup’s greatest moments ever as well as winning football’s biggest prize and was considered the third best player in the world in 1990. When all of that is listed out, he has to go down as one of the greatest players in World Cup and German history. Check out pythagorasinboots.com for their excellent rating and summary of Andreas Brehme on their site.
By Owen Coyne
Taken to the Corner 