After almost 20 years at FC Bayern , Franz Beckenbauer moved to the New York Cosmos in 1977 . His captain at the time , Werner Roth , recounts how the “ Kaiser “ joked around with handcuffs , grumbled at softball – and how Pelé scared the whole team with a shark in his bathtub .
February 2025
After almost 20 years at FC Bayern , Franz Beckenbauer moved to the New York Cosmos in 1977 . His captain at the time , Werner Roth , recounts how the “ Kaiser “ joked around with handcuffs , grumbled at softball – and how Pelé scared the whole team with a shark in his bathtub .
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BAYERN LIFE
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Way up high : Beckenbauer shows his mother Antonie Central Park in 1978 .
When Franz Beckenbauer landed in New York , Werner Roth was running late . He was generally quite relaxed regarding time , but in this case it was a problem : Roth , captain of the New York Cosmos , was on his way to pick up the US club ‘ s new superstar from the airport . He put his foot down and was stopped by the police in the borough of Queens . “ I was lucky ,“ he says today , and his laughter booms across the Atlantic through the phone receiver : when he explained to the officers that he had to pick up Franz Beckenbauer , they both turned out to be Cosmos fans , with one of them even being of German descent . They immediately decided not to fine him and instead rode in front of his car as an escort – with blue lights flashing and sirens blaring , Roth arrived at John F . Kennedy Airport in time . On 1 July 1977 , New York became an empire . And Franz Beckenbauer finally a man of the world in the USA , between the urban canyons of the Big Apple , through encounters with Andy Warhol , Cassius Clay and Mick Jagger , on the football pitch alongside Pelé , Carlos Alberto , Giorgio Chinaglia – and Werner Roth , the Germanspeaking captain of the Cosmos ’ glittering global line-up , which was to make football socially acceptable in the States . Even back then , it was said that the USA was the land of opportunity . And New York provided the perfect playing field .
In the New World , too , the
Kaiser left opponents in his wake .
Roth was born in 1948 in what was then Yugoslavia . The difficult post-war times drove his family to move to New York when he was eight years old . He grew up in Queens , in one of the ethnic German communities that had developed there . “ We were seen as ‘ German immigrants ‘,“ he says . Many people from Germany and Eastern Europe settled in Queens to start a new life . The children played football in the shadow of the construction site of the emerging World Trade Centre , and football , which was unpopular in the USA , forged a strong bond among the immigrants . Clubs were organised with names such as “ Greek Americans “ or “ SC Eintracht “. Roth himself played for the “ German-Hungarian SC “. The floor of their football stadium consisted of dirt and grime , not a blade of grass , as he remembers : “ But on matchdays at the weekend , the spectators flocked there in their thousands – it was our world .”
The stuff of Hollywood
These days , Roth lives in Los Angeles . He helps talented players prepare for life as a professional footballer – and he ’ s writing a screenplay for a TV series about his time with the
FC Bayern Magazine 67