Early Successes in The Bundesliga
With the beginning of the 1963–64 season the first German division – which until then had been split into five regional divisions – was unified into one national league, the Bundesliga.
The start of the new league saw disappointment for Bayern. As TSV 1860 had just won the last Oberliga championship – one of the few occasions they have been ahead of Bayern in that era – it was them who joined the new elite of German football. Bayern's newly elected president Wilhelm Neudecker, the father of the modern FC Bayern hired Zlatko "Czik" Čajkovski, a former Yugoslav World Cup player in 1950 and 1954, who had also achieved fame for coaching Cologne to the 1962 championship. This coup paid off, as he formed an aspiring team with the talented young players that should later be referred to as "the axis": goal keeper Sepp Maier, Franz Beckenbauer and Gerd Müller. After missing out on promotion to the Bundesliga in 1964, finishing second in the league behind Hessen Kassel, Bayern won the Regionalliga Süd (II) in 1965 and gained promotion alongside future rival Borussia Mönchengladbach.
The team, average age 22, immediately reached third place in the league in a year when a sparkling 1860 won their first and only national champions title. Even more important for Bayern was the win in the Cup final against MSV Duisburg (4–2), leading them into the Cup Winners Cup.
The team's star was the 20 year old Franz Beckenbauer who finished the season off by playing at the World Cup 1966 in England where he captured the imagination of a global audience. His efforts were rewarded with a third place in the voting for Europe's Player of the Year.
In the next season Bayern became the only third German team ever to defend the German Cup as Hamburg proved easy prey in the final and were wiped away with a record 4–0 win. The highlight was the participation in the European Cup Winners Cup in Nuremberg which the young team won in a dramatic final 1–0 against Rangers. The goal in extra time was scored by Franz "the Bull" Roth, who would win many other cup finals for Bayern.
A slowdown of progress in the 1967–68 season saw another Yugoslav, Branko Zebec taking over Čajkovski's job. He curbed the offensive style of the Bayern play and the discipline paid off when Bayern won the 1968–69 Championship with the Cup to boot: the first double in Bundesliga history. During the whole season Bayern used only 13 players.
Borussia Mönchengladbach, promoted to the Bundesliga in the same year as Bayern, emerged as serious rivals to Bayern's ascendancy. They would win the next two championships, and Bayern president Neudecker, on the recommendation of Beckenbauer, called on Udo Lattek from the coaching staff of the national team to take over the reins at Bayern. In his first year he only managed to return the Cup to the banks of Isar river, but with young and hungry reinforcements such as Paul Breitner and Uli Hoeneß he formed the team that achieved the first German Championship hat-trick in history.
Read more about this topic: History Of FC Bayern Munich
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or successes:
“As I went forth early on a still and frosty morning, the trees looked like airy creatures of darkness caught napping; on this side huddled together, with their gray hairs streaming, in a secluded valley which the sun had not penetrated; on that, hurrying off in Indian file along some watercourse, while the shrubs and grasses, like elves and fairies of the night, sought to hide their diminished heads in the snow.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Small successes are still successes; great failures are still failures.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)