Season 1990/91: A sun king reigns at Schalke - and provides the best entertainment in the league. Uli Hoeneß in particular has taken a liking to the royal blue Günter Eichberg. But the manager loses interest in teasing when he looks at the table. 1. FC Kaiserslautern not only teases Bayern in the end!
In the 1990/91 season at Schalke, they were eagerly dreaming of the first division again - and they had the perfect man in the club for that. They all just called President Günter Eichberg the "Sun King". A mad man with visions. And so the Royal Blues signed Bayern player Radmilo Mihajlovic in February. But the transfer did not go through without any background noise. Rather, it came to the meanwhile legendary private feud between the royal blue Sun King Günter Eichberg and Uli Hoeneß. The story of this dispute became public because the Bayern manager was delighted that he was able to use a trick to increase the transfer fee by half a million.
Actually, everything was clear back then: Schalke's manager Helmut Kremers had already negotiated a fixed amount of 2.5 million with Bayern. But Eichberg preferred to do it himself and announced, somewhat prematurely, that the Yugoslavian would move to Gelsenkirchen even before the contracts were signed. Hoeneß didn't like that at all. He had Eichberg align: Not like that! He countered with self-confidence: "Hoeneß still believes that he is the greatest. He can blow me on the slicer."
Munich was a bit stubborn, Eichberg added something and Mihajlovic got permission to change. Hoeneß was jubilant: "If the Kremers had conducted the negotiations, Mihajlovic would have been half a million cheaper. If we always earn 500,000 marks with such comedies, then Eichberg can blow me as often as he wants. He only needs the place and time announce. I'm ready immediately."
It was quiet for many years. The story became more and more embellished, more colorful and bigger. Until one day Günter Eichberg spoke up, clarified a few things and added a punch line to the story: "There are adventurous things going around. The following is true - and it's not a story in which I do particularly well. I was myself at the time in Munich. Nobody else. And the transfer fee with Bayern was fixed relatively quickly. They told me you could get McInally or Mihajlovic. One of the two could only play at Bayern at the time. I chose Mihajlovic. And the transfer fee , that was five million at the time, I paid it personally - to this day - and didn't get a penny back from it. That's the truth and whatever is written there and whoever says it is total nonsense.
And that went even further afterwards, because he received a bonus, which also had to be taxed - of course he hadn't done that, he had made it to Yugoslavia. I also had to pay taxes for that. During the negotiations, I was only a corner apart from him when it came to his own salary. And the conversation took place in my brother's apartment, who lived in Munich, in a private circle. However, Mic often answered the phone, and apparently Fritz Scherer, who was Bayern President at the time, and Uli Hoeneß, who was already a manager, were on the other side. And they always whispered in his ear what he should tell me.
At some point I got tired of it, so I said: 'Pay attention, Mic, give me the form. I'm signing the contract now and left the earning money open. I'm going to the toilet now, and when I come back, did you put a number in there and either sign it or not.' And then when I came back I saw that he had put in a number that was more close to what what I had imagined in our conversation - not what he had thought. It wasn't until three days later, when I looked at it again, that I noticed that this little prat had made a dollar sign in front of it. Then there was nothing more to be done and that was paid for and eventually forgotten. But still not forgiven." A crazy story from a completely different time in the Bundesliga.
Meanwhile, in the fight for the title, there was a real surprise in the 1990/91 season. During the summer break, Leverkusen's Reiner Calmund said: "We no longer need to wet our pants in front of Bayern. This season we'll be clawing at Bayern's throne." Bayern's speaker Stefan Effenberg saw things differently: "The others are too stupid to win the title." But when two people quarrel, it is well known that the third party is often happy.
In this case it was the "Red Devils" from the Palatinate. Under the direction of their new coach Karl-Heinz Feldkamp, Kaiserslautern had put together an outstanding series in the pre-season from March, which led Feldkamp to the following statement: "If we had played like this for a whole season, we might even have been champions." Now they actually made it - and that despite the fact that Uli Hoeneß had said in his smug and arrogant way: "Anyone who has any idea knows that Kaiserslautern will not be German champions."
The satisfaction for the "Red Devils" was all the better later. In the end, they showed up in T-shirts with very special prints: "Bavaria is beautiful. Lautern is at the top", "Munich, cosmopolitan city with pain", "Bavaria are loud, we are Lautern" and "Let's go Viezemeister". The "ie" in "Vizemeister" was intentionally misspelled, as Lautern's captain Stefan Kuntz explained with a smile: "The spelling shows how seriously we take it."
