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