Player Profile - Sepp Maier

SEPP MAIER


Full Name: Josef Dieter Maier.

Born: 28 February 1944 in Metten/Germany.

Nickname: ‚Katze von Anzing’ (Cat of Anzing).

Position: Goalkeeper.

Caps:
West Germany 95 (1966-1979) / 0 goals

Domestic League Games:
West Germany 473 (1965-1979) / 0 goals

Domestic Cup Games:
German Cup 63 (1965-1979) / 0 goals

European Cup Games:
83 (1966-1978) / 0 goals

International Club Cup Games:
European Champions Cup 39 (1969-1977) / 0 goals
European Cup Winners’ Cup 25 (1966-1972) / 0 goals
Fairs Cup 1 (1963) / 0 goals
UEFA Cup 15 (1970-1978) / 0 goals
European Super-Cup 4 (1975-1976) / 0 goals
Intercontinental Cup 2 (1976) / 0 goals

European Footballer of the Year: 1974 (15th), 1975 (5th)

German Footballer of the Year: 1975, 1977, 1978

Clubs
TSV Haar (1952-1959)
Bayern Munich (Youth Team) (1959-1962)
Bayern Munich (1962-1979)

Trophies won (compact version):
1 World Cup
1 European Championship
4 German league titles (with Bayern)
3 European Champion Cups (with Bayern)
1 European Cup Winners’ Cup (with Bayern)
1 Intercontinental Cup (with Bayern)
4 German Cups (with Bayern)
3 times German Footballer of the Year

Trophies won (detailed version):
World Cup: 1974
European Championship: 1972
European Champions Cup: 1974, 1975, 1976
European Cup Winners Cup: 1967
Intercontinental Cup Winner: 1976
German Champion: 1969, 1972, 1973, 1974
German runner-up: 1970, 1971
German Cup winner: 1966, 1967, 1969, 1971
German Cup runner-up: -

World Cup Participation:
1966*, 1970, 1974, 1978

European Championship Participation:
1968**, 1972, 1976

* = did not play
** = only Qualifiers

When he was young, Sepp Maier was an excellent gymnast, who managed to win youth titles at this sport. Parallel to his gymnastics, he had also started to play football, of course playing forward, as his dream was to become a great goalscorer. At the age of 15, he moved from his first club TSV Haar, a suburb of Munich, to Bayern. Soon after he arrived, the Bayern youth goalie got injured, and Maier was ordered by his coach Rudi Weiss to play goalie. Although he couldn`t keep his sheet clean in his first games, his performances were convincing, among them two saved penalties. From now on the goalkeeper position at the Bayern youth team was his, with Sepp immediately developing a passion for his new position. The following year, Eastern 1960, Maier already took part in the UEFA-Youth tournament in Portugal, where his coach would be Helmut Schön.

In 1963, he was called up for the German F.A.`s amateur team and it was his dream to take part in the 1964 Olympics. But his club urged him to become a professional, as Bayern`s first team goalie, Fritz Kosar, was injured. Maier got to play four matches for Bayern`s first team, but when Kosar was fit again, Maier was benched once more, and due to his becoming a professional, he wasn`t allowed to continue playing for the German amateur team. But Maier`s situation changed for the better in the 1963-64 season. Kosar was out of form, so Maier got the chance to prove his worth as a goalie (due to injury worries in the team, Kosar shortly kept his place, now playing as an inside forward!). The 1963-launched professional first Division (Bundesliga) was the club`s main goal during these years, but they sharply failed to qualify for promotion in 1964. Yet Bayern`s fate was about to change dramatically during that summer, when Franz Beckenbauer and Gerd Müller joined the team for the 1964-65 season. With Sepp Maier in goal, the famous Bayern (and later Germany) axis of Maier-Beckenbauer-Müller was now formed and beginning to show first results. Bayern were promoted in 1965 and won the German Cup in 1966 and 1967, the European Cup in 1967 and the German double in 1969 (first time a club achieved this in 33 years).

Already in his first Bundesliga season, Maier excelled in his job between the goal posts, which led West Germany`s new manager Helmut Schön (successor to Sepp Herberger) to call Maier up to play for his national team in the spring of 1966, playing his first game for West Germany in Dublin against Ireland (4-0 win). Right after the 1966 World Cup, Schön decided to make Maier his number one keeper, making him replace the 32-year-old Hans Tilkowski. For the next 13 years, Maier remained West Germany`s first choice keeper, although there were periods where he was seriously challenged by a variety of other good keepers (most notably by Horst Wolter 1967-69, as well as Wolfgang Kleff and Bernd Franke in 1973).

Like most great goalkeepers, Maier`s strength were enormous reflexes that allowed him to save even so-called ‘unsavable’ shots and headers, and his experience at gymnastics at young age proved a great asset to his keeping. Added to his reflexes, he was also very movable in the air, a secure ball-catcher and a powerful jumper. He also mastered the goalkeeping job inside the penalty box, but he often tended to play quite risky, which sometimes led to unnecessary goals and criticism from the media. Another weakness were sometimes lapses in concentration, mostly in less-important matches.

For Bayern and West Germany, the 1970s proved to be an outstandingly successful decade. After playing his first World Cup in 1970, he went on to win the European Championship with his West German teammates in 1972 in impressive style, and after a severe crisis in the autumn of 1973, he was back to top form for the 1974 World Cup held at home. Next to Franz Beckenbauer and Gerd Müller, it was Sepp Maier that was the most instrumental player in Germany winning this World Cup, which had proved to be a far more difficult task than expected after the great win in the European Championships two years earlier. Maier`s two greatest games for West Germany were those where it mattered most, the 1974 quasi-semi final against Poland and the legendary final against the Netherlands in Munich, when he played the game of his life in the second half, with the Dutch sending wave after wave of attacks against the German goal, none of them being able to score against Maier. The West German coach after the match commented that “Maier saved marvellously, at least half a dozen of unsavable ones!” To Maier, this excellent performance against the Dutch was a welcome consolidation, for his worst performance ever was against Ajax in the 1972-73 Champions Cup Quarterfinal in Amsterdam, where he let in four goals in the second half, three of them savable. According to Sepp Maier, that was the worst night in his footballing career, he was so shattered that he even went on to burn his gloves after the match.

Bayern had won the Champions Cup in style in 1974, beating Spanish Champions Atletico in the final 5-1 on aggregate in two matches. The Bayern team hit a slump the next season, with even Beckenbauer playing out of form in the winter months of 1974-75. It was Sepp Maier that was nearing his best form ever, for he was now in the best age for a goalie and after his great display in the World Cup, he had become West Germany`s unrivalled number one keeper. With Maier in great form, Bayern managed to get its act together again in the league and especially in the Champions Cup, which was defended against the English Champions Leeds United in 1975 in Paris (2-0). Maier again performed excellently in this match, just like 1976, when his club won the Champions Cup for a third successive time against St. Etienne of France in Glasgow. Without Maier`s exceptional performances, these triumphs would not have been possible. Maier was one of those keepers that seemed to be made for ‘big game’ occasions. Of the 13 big finals he played with either Bayern or West Germany (1 World Cup final, 2 Euro finals, 4 European Cups finals, 4 German Cup finals and 2 Intercontinental Cup finals), he didn`t lose a single one (the 1976 European Championship final vs. Czecheslovakia was decided by a penalty shoot-out).

Little did he know that the 1978 World Cup would be his last major tournament. Right after the end of the 1978-79 season, Maier was involved in a car crash, which abruptly ended his career. Without that accident, it would have been out of question that Maier would have been taking part in the 1980 European Championship held in Italy as well as the 1982 World Cup, as he had always made clear that his main target was to still be a professional goalkeeper at the age of 40 (which he would have been in 1984). But thus his career had to end at the age of 35. Maier is to this day the most-decorated goal keeper in the history of the sport. Among his records is a series of 442 consecutive first league games (from 20 August 1966 to 6 June 1979) and the winning of three “German Player of the Year” awards (goalkeeper record), no small feat considering that West Germany possessed an abundance of talented field players during Maier`s era.

Sepp Maier was a goalkeeper with a strong character who did not shy away from confrontation with powerful people, but he was also blessed with a dry sense of humour, which was sometimes paired with clownesque sense for slap-stick gimmicks, for example he once secretly tied up the shoelaces of all of the participants of an after-match-banquet, among them several German F.A. dignitaries. Two other incidents are also telling about his character: it was the winter of 1974-75, when Beckenbauer had scored two own goals in a row, perfectly augmenting the already severe crisis of his club Bayern, which found itself struggling against relegation that year. In the next meeting of the team, manager Dettmar Cramer told the defenders who would have to man-mark which player in their next game. After Cramer had finished his instructions, Maier earnestly asked “and who`s supposed to man-mark Franz?” Another telling incident took place in the winter of 1978. The Bayern team was unhappy with its Hungarian manager Gyula Lorant (ex-Magic Magyar). Lorant had not had a very nice character, to put it mildly, which resulted in a lot of quarrel with the players, among them Paul Breitner and Sepp Maier (who captained his side). After yet another crisis, Lorant was fired, and Bayern`s long-time president Franz Neudecker was very keen on hiring the old Austrian manager Max Merkel, another twilight character. None of the players wanted Merkel as new coach (he had been managing archrivals TSV 1860 Munich previously). The players wanted Lorant`s Hungarian assistant, Pal Csernai, as new coach and they won this struggle for power, by starting a revolution (led by Breitner and Maier) by ousting the all-powerful president Neudecker and installing a new, player-friendly president in Willi Hoffmann. This was an unheard of incident not only in German club football, a real over-throw, which never happened again since. The conservative German F.A. was not pleased at all and promptly reacted by shortly banning Sepp Maier from the German national team. But due to pressure from the public as well as superb performances of Maier for Bayern, Germany manager Jupp Derwall decided to call Maier up again to play for West Germany in the spring of 1979.

After his forced career end in June 1979, Maier started to built up a big tennis center outside of Munich, as one of his passions had always been tennis and when his old Bayern mate Franz Beckenbauer took over the West Germany national team in 1984, Maier got back to work for Germany as the keeper`s coach (which he remained for almost 20 years). He later did the same job at Bayern and is still active as a keeper’s coach there.


League Statistics per Season

Season - Club - Games – Goals [ Caps / Goals ]
1962/63 Bayern Munich.............04 / 00
1963/64 Bayern Munich.............regional
1964/65 Bayern Munich.............regional
1965/66 Bayern Munich.............31 / 00 [ 1 / 0 ]
1966/67 Bayern Munich.............34 / 00 [ 4 / 0 ]
1967/68 Bayern Munich.............34 / 00 [ 3 / 0 ]
1968/69 Bayern Munich.............34 / 00 [ 8 / 0 ]
1969/70 Bayern Munich.............34 / 00 [ 8 / 0 ]
1970/71 Bayern Munich.............34 / 00 [ 8 / 0 ]
1971/72 Bayern Munich.............34 / 00 [ 9 / 0 ]
1972/73 Bayern Munich.............34 / 00 [ 4 / 0 ]
1973/74 Bayern Munich.............34 / 00 [12 / 0 ]
1974/75 Bayern Munich.............34 / 00 [ 5 / 0 ]
1975/76 Bayern Munich.............34 / 00 [ 8 / 0 ]
1976/77 Bayern Munich.............34 / 00 [ 6 / 0 ]
1977/78 Bayern Munich.............34 / 00 [13 / 0 ]
1978/79 Bayern Munich.............34 / 00 [ 6 / 0 ]

International Club Games

1962/63 Bayern Munich.....Fairs Cup..01 / 00
1966/67 Bayern Munich.....EC II........09 / 00
1967/68 Bayern Munich.....EC II........08 / 00
1969/70 Bayern Munich.....EC I.........02 / 00
1970/71 Bayern Munich.....UEFA Cup..08 / 00
1971/72 Bayern Munich.....EC II........08 / 00
1972/73 Bayern Munich.....EC I.........05 / 00
1973/74 Bayern Munich.....EC I.........10 / 00
1974/75 Bayern Munich.....EC I.........07 / 00
1975/76 Bayern Munich.....EC I.........09 / 00
1976/77 Bayern Munich.....EC I.........06 / 00
1977/78 Bayern Munich.....UEFA Cup..06 / 00