Do we like them?

Do we like Franz Beckenbauer?

Our score: 5 out of 10. A thin record on harm and an unresolved cloud on the 2006 bid, with little real good we could open and check.

Franz Beckenbauer was “the Kaiser”: the elegant defender who won the World Cup with Germany as a player and later as a coach. He died aged 78 in January 2024, so there is nothing new on him lately, only tributes and the old arguments.

The big stoush is the 2006 World Cup. Der Spiegel first raised the claim in October 2015 that the German football federation used a slush fund to buy votes, and a €6.7 million payment sat at the centre of it. A law firm's report found a money trail linking a Beckenbauer account, a former Adidas boss and Qatar, and said it could not rule out that Germany bought votes.

Beckenbauer denied it flat out, saying “We did not buy any votes. Definitely not.” He blamed his late lawyer for handling his affairs and admitted “In hindsight, I might have made mistakes.” In 2016 Swiss authorities opened criminal proceedings over alleged fraud, mismanagement, money laundering and misappropriation, and he was one of four organising committee members under investigation, with his lawyers saying he cooperated.

Separately, FIFA's ethics body warned and fined him for failing to cooperate with its investigation into the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids. That is a real mark on the good-person side, though it is a fine for not cooperating, not a finding about bribes. We could not open a source on how the Swiss case finally ended, so we won't guess.

On the harm test, we found nothing from him against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet in the pages we could open. That is a thin record rather than a glowing one, and we did not find a clean source on his charity work either, so we won't pad it out.

So it is a close call. He is a genuine giant of the game and nothing nasty from him turned up, but the 2006 questions were never cleanly answered, and you can fairly read his lawyer-did-it defence either way.