This is the latest in a series about the 16 triumphant teams in the European Championship, before the 17th edition is played in Germany this summer.
So far, we’ve looked at the Soviet Union in 1960, Spain in 1964, Italy in 1968, West Germany in 1972 and Czechoslovakia in 1976. This time, it’s the turn of the West Germans again, in 1980.
Introduction
Euro 1980 is possibly the least-fabled European Championship.
Whereas the five previous tournaments are notable because they were the formative years of the competition or featured a unique eventual winner, Euro 1980 was a damp squib. Italy hosted for the second time in the space of 12 years and attendances were poor.
West Germany won the competition for the second time in eight years, but were much less exciting than they had been when triumphing in 1972.
As the first eight-team tournament, this was arguably the first Euros in the format we now consider normal: hosts selected in advance and handed automatic qualification and a group stage to begin with. And yet UEFA still managed to make a mess of things…
You might be surprised to learn…
While this was the first European Championship that featured a group stage, this round was not a feeder to the semi-finals — but a replacement for the semi-finals. In other words, there were two groups of four and the winners of each — West Germany and Belgium — went straight through to the final. The runners-up in each section — Czechoslovakia and Italy — contested the third-place play-off.
It was widely considered that this format favoured cautious play, at a time when European football was dominated by defensive tactics anyway. Teams were scared to lose in the group stage, knowing one defeat could be fatal.
As it happened, West Germany already knew they were assured of top spot going into their last group game, and were able to rest players who were a booking away from missing the final. The group’s other match had already been played earlier that day — and West Germany would expose the problems with this format two years later at the 1982 World Cup when they conspired with Austria to eliminate Algeria in a game that has been infamously dubbed as ‘The Disgrace of Gijon’.
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The manager
Jupp Derwall was the natural choice as West Germany’s manager, having been a long-serving assistant to his predecessor Helmut Schon.
He won two caps for West Germany as a forward in his playing career, and as a coach offered minimal little top-level club experience, but he would take the Germans to this triumph and then the final of the 1982 World Cup.
Nicknamed ‘Chief Silver Curls’, he was generally considered something of a ‘third way’ between the disciplinarian Sepp Herberger and the more romantic Schon. Derwall was a results-based coach, but also liberal in terms of his squad management.
At times, he struggled with the political element of dealing with the German FA, and fell out with a couple of key players. He also made the peculiar decision of taking only 19 players rather than the permitted 22 to the 1982 World Cup, believing that the three others would be more likely to cause dressing-room problems than offer much on the pitch.
West Germany’s underperformance in his latter years meant Derwall became reviled in his home country and he surprisingly elected to move to Galatasaray in Turkey, his final job, and therefore never coached in the Bundesliga back home.
In Turkey, he won the league, and became hugely respected for revolutionising coaching methodology. Fatih Terim, the future four-time Galatasaray manager and three-time Turkey manager who won the UEFA Cup with the Istanbul club in 2000 and took his country to the Euro 2008 semi-finals, had played for him and always cites Derwall as a major influence.
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Tactics
Things evolved over the course of the tournament — or, to be precise, they evolved after Derwall named a very defensive line-up for the opening 1-0 victory over Czechoslovakia, and then went all-out for the 3-2 win over the Netherlands three days later.
It felt like he started the tournament with seven defenders and three attackers, but after overhauling the midfield with the use of Bernd Schuster and Hansi Muller, it was more like five defenders and five attackers. The new central midfielders were both elegant playmakers capable of spreading play — the blond Schuster to the right, the dark-haired Muller to the left. Both pushed forward.
Karl-Heinz Rummenigge operated as a support striker in behind Klaus Allofs, who played an energetic role from the left, and Horst Hrubesch — one of those ungainly but prolific penalty-box poachers Germany seems to specialise in. This wasn’t an all-out-attacking side, but with the forward movement of the midfielders and the running of Rummenigge, it was an attractive one.
In defence, the wing-backs pushed forward aggressively and one of the defenders — not always the sweeper — would end up at the base of midfield. At the start of the tournament, the sweeper was Bernhard Cullmann, although he was replaced with Real Madrid’s Uli Stielike dropping from midfield into that role and performing excellently.
The other two centre-backs played man-marking roles. In the opening game, the defence featured two brothers, Bernd and Karlheinz Forster, although only the latter started the final, where he played excellently alongside captain Bernard Dietz.
Key player
Harald Schumacher, two years away from his infamous clattering of France’s Patrick Battiston at the World Cup in Spain, was an excellent goalkeeper. Allofs finished top goalscorer with three goals, all of them struck in that entertaining 3-2 group-stage win over the Dutch. Rummenigge would win that year’s Ballon d’Or.
But reports from the time are unequivocal about the Germans’ star man, even if he only actually played in two of their four matches at the tournament.
Schuster was a talented 20-year-old who had played under Derwall in West Germany’s youth teams, although there was a debate about his optimum position. He favoured a midfield role, where he was more involved and could cause problems with his long-range shooting.
But, oddly, he had broken into the Cologne side in a man-marking centre-back role and then had been switched to being used as a sweeper at club level, in keeping with the German tradition of converting playmakers into the free role in defence. Derwall was annoyed by this switch, believing that Schuster needed a couple more years of experience in midfield before converting to that role, a la Franz Beckenbauer.
Indeed, such was the debate about Schuster’s best role, he was compared to both Beckenbauer, the best ball-playing defender the game had seen, and Gunter Netzer, the elegant No 10 from West Germany’s Euros winning team of 1972.
Strangely, while Cologne were playing Schuster as a sweeper and Cullmann in midfield, Derwall favoured the opposite at the outset — Cullmann at the back and Schuster in midfield. The latter was sometimes referred to as a ‘utility starlet’, which feels unusual.
While injuries to Rainer Bonhof and Herbert Zimmerman made Schuster’s progress into the team easier, he was still omitted for the opener, a narrow win over defending champions Czechoslovakia by the only goal, as Derwall favoured a more cautious approach.
But then, for the crucial middle group game against an underperforming Netherlands side, Derwall introduced Schuster in his favoured midfield role. With his blond hair and his tendency to play in the inside-right channel, he is in some ways similar to Kevin De Bruyne when running forward, and was involved in all three goals as West Germany went 3-0 up.
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First, he slalomed past two defenders and smashed a shot from outside the box against the post, with Allofs on hand to turn in the rebound. In the second half, he won possession in midfield, stormed forward in that inside-right channel and slipped in Muller, who prodded the ball inside for Allofs to fire home his second.
Finally, he dribbled down the right, almost reaching the byline to the extent that goalkeeper Piet Schrijvers dived at his feet and left an open goal. His cutback allowed Allofs to complete a hat-trick which owed more to Schuster than the actual goalscorer.
That was nearly Schuster’s last contribution to the tournament. He had collected a booking that day so was rested for the final group game against Greece; then, before the final, suffered a knee injury in training which nearly ruled him out of contention. Happily, he was fit to return.
His performances were so impressive that he earned a move to Barcelona immediately after the tournament, spending eight years there before a controversial move to arch-rivals Real Madrid and then, after two years, another controversial move across the city to Atletico.
Schuster’s international career brought a total of just 21 caps and he retired (internationally) at the age of 24 because of disagreements with Derwall and the German FA.
Many of the ‘controversies’ at the time were based around his wife Gaby, a beautician and model who became his agent. She was a tough negotiator who brokered those aforementioned moves between rival clubs, and also demanded a huge fee for Schuster to come out of international retirement at the 1986 World Cup.
Schuster had also received severe criticism for missing a game against Albania because he wanted to be with Gaby for the birth of his second child, something that was considered highly unusual at the time. Reading reports from back then, it is difficult not to conclude that Schuster was unreasonably mocked for being a supportive partner, and Gaby was the victim of sexism because people couldn’t accept that a woman could be a perfectly capable agent.
“In Barcelona, I am loved and adored,” said Schuster. “I’m always in trouble in Germany and am constantly insulted and mocked in some newspapers.”
The final
A very entertaining encounter in which West Germany were clearly better than Belgium, but struggled to put the game to bed.
Schuster, again outstanding, was the architect for the opener after 10 minutes when suddenly playing a one-two with Allofs while breaking forward from midfield, then chipping the ball over a defender for the other striker, Hrubesch, who chested the ball down and slammed it home from outside the area.
The Germans had, by a distance, the higher quality chances, with Jean-Marie Pfaff performing well in goal for Belgium. They were also unfortunate in the penalty concession for the equaliser, as Stielike’s tackle on striker Francois Van Der Elst was clearly outside the box. That said, it was a terribly cynical challenge, so it is difficult to have much sympathy.
Rene Vandereycken converted from the spot with 15 minutes remaining, and at that point there was a sense that West Germany had lost both energy and belief. Hans-Peter Briegel, the usually unstoppable left wing-back, had departed through injury and Schuster was perhaps feeling the effects of the knee problem he’d picked up in training.
The defining moment
West Germany put together some excellent passing moves in the final, with Schuster and Rummenigge breaking past the strikers dangerously. So it was something of a shame that the winning goal came from a simple set piece.
Rummenigge took an in-swinging corner, Pfaff half-came for it but found himself in no man’s land, and Hrubesch headed home his second of the game with two minutes remaining.
Were they the best team?
They were, in part because nobody else impressed. The Czechs, champions from four years earlier, were past their best and rather defensive-minded. The Dutch offered little ‘Total Football’ and key players were typically squabbling with each other.
Belgium were surprise finalists and the only feature of their play which received major praise was their offside trap. They were also unpopular, as they were in the final at the expense of host nation Italy, after they essentially out-Italianed the Italians with a defensive-minded performance in the final group match.
That left the Germans as rightful champions.
“It took an awful lot of rubbish before the European Championship produced a match worth of its setting,” read World Soccer’s report on the final. “But there could be no doubt that the right team had won.”
(Top photo: Getty Images)
