When Aston Villa's Deadly Doug Ellis had Franz Beckenbauer in his sights
Franz Beckenbauer had a football career like few others.
One of only three people to win the World Cup as both player and manager, his standing as one of the sport’s all-time greats has long been assured.
Had things panned out a little differently in the summer of 1990, the German legend might also have added manager of Aston Villa to his illustrious CV.
For sport journalists working the Midlands patch at the time, Beckenbauer’s death this week at the age of 78 prompted memories of one of the most remarkable stories to emerge from a Villa managerial search.
With Graham Taylor destined for the England job having guided Villa to a second-placed finish in the First Division, chairman Doug Ellis was hunting a replacement. Beckenbauer, then just weeks away from guiding West Germany to glory at Italia ‘90, was on his list of targets.
Ellis, it was reported, had been making enquiries about the then 44-year-old’s availability in preparation for trying to tempt him to Villa Park. “In my defence, I didn’t categorically say that Franz Beckenbauer was going to be appointed Villa boss, simply that he was being targeted by the club as Graham Taylor’s successor,” says Rob Bishop, the former Express & Star reporter who went on to break the exclusive story of Villa’s interest.
“Wrong or not, it sent my reputation soaring. Even when I confided in one of them that I wasn’t totally convinced Beckenbauer was bound for Birmingham, he simply responded: ‘Doesn’t matter mate. Even if it’s not right, what a great story!’”
Bishop’s instincts turned out to be correct. A month or after his story, Villa instead appointed the Czechoslovakia manager Jozef Venglos as Taylor’s successor.
Yet his original story about the club’s interest in Beckenbauer was entirely correct. Ellis later confirmed his failed attempt to lure ‘Der Kaiser’ to the West Midlands in his 1998 autobiography, Deadly, albeit it would be something a stretch – and then some – to suggest he ever got close to pulling off the coup.
An occasional skiing partner of Beckenbauer when holidaying in Austria and having once shared a meal with the former defender and his wife, Ellis put in a call to the Kaiser’s family home, “to establish if he would be interested in joining Aston Villa.”
He wrote: “Having rung his number a lady answered the telephone and I chatted to her for a moment or two on the basis that, as she would no doubt recall, we had dined together and had also met at the ski resort.
“After a while she broke in and said: ‘I’m sorry, I think you must have the wrong wife...’
“How was I to know that, in the interim, he had changed partners? However, I passed on the message he could ring me if he were interested in being Aston Villa’s manager, but he never did take up the option.
“That, of course, could depend on whether ‘the wrong wife’ ever passed on my message.”
A reminder of how the world worked before the internet, mobile phones and WhatsApp, the somewhat comedic conclusion to the pursuit of Beckenbauer might also serve as a metaphor for an era when, under Ellis, Villa dreamed big without ever having the conviction or the means to realise them.
Venglos was still a bold appointment and an historic one, the first foreign manager to take charge of an English club. But within a year, he was gone, sacked after a 17th-placed finish and replaced by Ron Atkinson.
Beckenbauer, having stepped down as West Germany boss after the World Cup, instead accepted the job of managing Marseille but left the French club within a year, eventually going on to spend two spells as boss as Bayern Munich before moving into the role of administrator. Whether he didn’t fancy the Villa job, or didn’t get the message, the summer of 1990 might still be considered one of the great ‘what if?’ moments in club history.
