the original Bundesliga superstar

Playmaker and playboy, rebel and realist, multi-faceted businessman and prize-winning television pundit: Günter Netzer was the first true Bundesliga superstar.

Spearhead of a golden Foals generation

Two Bundesliga titles with Borussia Mönchengladbach at the start of the 1970s, two La Liga ones with Real Madrid midway through the same decade, and a UEFA European Championship winner’s medal as West Germany’s creative linchpin in 1972 provide the bare statistical bones of a playing career that still resonates down through the decades. Netzer was, and remains, one of a kind.

As a youngster playing for hometown club 1. FC Mönchengladbach, Günter’s precocious talent for combining football and finance came back to haunt his father, with whom he had agreed a five Deutschemark bonus for every goal he scored. After one particularly productive outing, Netzer later recalled that his dad had insisted on renegotiating terms. “I could certainly see where he was coming from. Five marks multiplied by 28 goals was a fairly gigantic sum back then.”

At 19, Netzer penned his first professional contract at Gladbach and by the time the club made the leap from the Regionalliga to the Bundesliga two years later, in 1965, Netzer was already running the show in midfield. Alongside the likes of Berti Vogts, Herbert Laumen and Jupp Heynckes, the loping general with the trademark blonde mane and unmatched skillset was a key player in the original Foals side which rapidly rose to challenge Bayern Munich as the dominant domestic force for most of the 1970s. “For me, it was heaven,” Netzer recalled. “To have the opportunity to help build up something like that in my own back yard.” 

‘A genius’

Help he certainly did. “Günter was a footballing genius,” fellow Mönchengladbach native and Borussia’s all-time top scorer Heynckes later recalled. “A great midfield strategist who made the telling pass and delivered fantastic free-kicks and corners.” As Netzer’s on-field fame grew, so his off-field interests expanded. As well as opening a night club in the city and developing a penchant for Ferraris, Netzer enjoyed mixing with Germany’s artistic community, noting with fascination “the crazy way they go about their business, and how they compare with footballers.”