GERD MULLER
Bayern Munich, 1964-1979
Much fanfare followed Bayern Munich striker Robert Lewandowski winning the Bundesliga Golden Boot in 2015-16 with 30 goals, a tally nobody had reached in three decades. All year long, Lewandowski’s progress was measured and pundits debated whether or not he – or his rivals, Thomas Muller and Pierre-emerick Aubameyang – could finally hit the landmark. Nobody even mentioned the more magical number, though. That’s because it’s a given for German football fans that the league’s single-season goal record will never be broken. No one will match the 40 goals Gerd Muller scored over 34 games in 1971-72.
A few of Muller’s records have been bettered over the years, most recently in June 2014 when Miroslav Klose scored the 69th of his 71 Germany goals, but that 40-goal tally has proven to be way out of reach.
Bayern didn’t actually dominate the Bundesliga in that season. The title race went right down to the wire: Schalke, trailing Bayern by only one point, travelled to Munich on the final day. And Muller didn’t get off to a flying start, either: he’d always had a reputation as a slow starter and that was no different in 1971. The deceptively chubby striker had only one goal to his name after the first five matches, and even after 10 games he’d scored only four.
In fact, when the winter break began, there were no signs that this would shape up to be an historic season. Bayern were sitting in second place, three points behind Schalke, while Muller’s mind seemed to be on many things but not the game on the pitch. For months, he had been toying with a move abroad, although his contract ran to 1973. He told reporters he was sorry that Italy still hadn’t lifted the ban on foreigners, because he wanted to go and play “for Milan or Inter”, and in January 1972 he stated that there was “an 80 per cent chance I’ll leave Bayern Munich at the end of the season”.
Things got so bad that national team boss Helmut Schön, fearing for the striker’s form going into that summer’s European Championship, asked Muller to stop the rumour mill. Yet Muller seemed to thrive on the chaos surrounding him. In February he bagged five goals against Oberhausen, then calmly travelled to Rotterdam to negotiate with Feyenoord. Maybe it was all a ploy. Maybe he did all that to squeeze the kind of wages out of his club that Franz Beckenbauer was supposedly on. If that was his plan, it worked. In late March, Muller penned a more lucrative deal at Bayern. Then he scored six goals in three games to take his tally to 40 with another two matches left.
Amazingly, Muller misfired in the final two games. When Bayern beat Schalke 5-1 to secure the title, five different Bayern players scored, but not the man who scored more often than anyone else.