Uli Hoeneß eventually reconciled with his great rivals Christoph Daum and Willi Lemke, but lost them within two weeks. Their rivalry in the 1980s shaped the image of FC Bayern as a hated empire and continues to shape Bundesliga history to this day.
In the end, Uli Hoeneß was reconciled with his two great enemies – and it became a tragic twist that he lost both companions within two weeks. Christoph Daum died on Saturday, twelve days earlier Willi Lemke, the former manager of Werder Bremen, FC Bayern’s long-time main rival.
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Hardly anyone who only knows the stories as tales from the past can imagine how much the rivalries of that time shaped Hoeneß, Bayern and the entire football nation. The image of FC Bayern as we know it today, as a fan or as an opponent, was permanently formed in the 1980s, when first Lemke’s Bremen and then 1. FC Cologne with the then young coach Daum called for the hunt for him.
FC Bayern became a hated empire
One must remember: Bayern, with their legendary ensemble of Franz Beckenbauer, Sepp Maier, Gerd Müller as well as the young Hoeneß and Paul Breitner, were at the top of the Bundesliga and European football for years in the 1970s.
Despite the three famous national championship titles in a row between 1972 and 1974, the dominance was not yet consolidated. Borussia Mönchengladbach was even more successful with five titles in this era, after which HSV won the trophy three times under coaches Branko Zebec and Ernst Happel. After their first golden era, Bayern had some serious downward swings.
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Only after the upheaval with young manager Hoeneß did Bayern’s national success become an absolute constant: Between 1984 and 1990, the Munich team won the title in five out of six seasons, replacing 1. FC Nuremberg as record champions. Only Werder Bremen held their own by winning the title in 1988.
During this time, the perception of Bayern changed: sporting rivalries, folklore on the level of “Take the Lederhosen off the Bavarians” – that had existed before too. But in the eighties, everything came together to form a larger, politically charged whole. Bayern as a hated football empire that had to be overthrown – this image only took shape then. And Lemke and Hoeneß wielded the brushes.
Willi Lemke told the story that resonates
Lemke repeatedly portrayed Bayern as the villain favored by money and his Bremen team as the opposite: “FC Bayern Munich – they are the rich, the strong, the big ones,” he once said. “They are the ones who fight with big sleeves and elbows.” His club, on the other hand, wanted to be different: “Down to earth, close to the people, the guys next door.”
Long-time Bremen coach Otto Rehhagel fit the narrative: the miner’s son who grew up during the war and was a trained painter and varnisher always emphasized his simple roots and his aversion to what he considered to be the arrogance of power.
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Lemke, who was already the regional manager of the Bremen SPD at a young age, represented his view partly out of conviction and partly out of calculation: the story of poor versus rich, down-to-earth versus aloof, was a way of mobilizing the fans and irritating the opponent.
And Hoeneß was irritated.
Hoeneß saw his work unfairly distorted
CSU supporter Hoeneß called the Social Democrat Lemke an “agitator”, while the Social Democrat Lemke in turn insulted him as the “gravedigger of football”. Hoeneß found Lemke hypocritical and was also personally offended by the way Lemke portrayed his club.
Hoeneß still knew well that he had inherited the club in 1979 in a financially ailing state with debts running into millions. The fact that Lemke portrayed him as an over-privileged moneyed aristocracy a few years later was something he saw as an unfair distortion and denigration of his young life’s work.
The conclusion he drew from this was that he defended it with even greater conviction and counterattacked aggressively – thereby strengthening Bayern fans and opponents in their respective beliefs. The myth of the “Attack Department” and, to some extent, the Bavarian “Mia-san-mia” self-image has its origins in the Lemke-Hoeneß rivalry.
Death threats against Augenthaler as low point
At its most heated, the enmity was more than just football folklore: it had “traits that were simply no longer funny,” recalled then-Bayern player Dieter Hoeneß, Uli’s brother and Sebastian’s father.
Things got particularly ugly after the then Bayern captain Klaus Augenthaler seriously injured Werder striker Rudi Völler with a violent foul in 1985, which was dismissed by Hoeneß and coach Udo Lattek as “normal” (Lattek: “We’re not playing chess”).
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As a result of the heated atmosphere, Augenthaler received death threats, which the club considered so serious that he was given personal protection.
Daum had different motives than Lemke
Emotions boiled over in a similar manner a few years later between Hoeneß and Daum – although the then Cologne coach was less interested in social romanticism and more in psychological warfare and an extroverted show. The famous poison summit in the ZDF sports studio was the climax.
Despite the later, violent disagreements surrounding Daum’s cocaine affair, the wounds between Hoeneß and Daum healed more quickly. Many years later, Hoeneß still called Lemke an “enemy” and Daum only “with reservations”.
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It was only in 2015, after Hoeneß was convicted of tax evasion, that he and Lemke buried the hatchet. With the deaths of Lemke and Daum, an intense Bundesliga era is now even further into the past.
A past that, however, has a profound impact on the present.
