Retirement is never easy for a footballer. If you are lucky, you spend 20-odd years at peak physical condition, collecting fortune and fame while living the dream of many fans. Then one day, you wake up and are forced to accept that your body can no longer do what your mind wills. If you are unlucky, your career is cruelly cut short by injury or a similar tragedy. Like Marco Van Basten. Like Dean Ashton. Like Fabrice Muamba. Some manage the impossible. These are the ones that determine the terms of their own exit. Like Eric Cantona. Maybe, like Philipp Lahm.
From Stuttgart to Munich, Under the Watch of a Dictator
Many fans of English football will remember Felix Magath for a bizarre (and exaggerated) incident involving cheese and Brede Hangeland, as well as his notoriously torturous rules and training methods. What many may not know is that some of these methods served Magath extremely well in Germany during the turn of the century. He won the Bundesliga with both Bayern Munich and Wolfsburg and led Stuttgart into the UEFA Champions League. It was as coach of Stuttgart that Saddam – as Magath was often called – kept a close eye on Phillip Lahm as their paths crossed briefly when the young defender spent time on loan with Die Roten. The two were then reunited for 18 months at Bayern Munich when Magath coached the German giants, and under his guidance, Lahm successfully displaced long-serving left-back Bixente Lizarazu. At that stage of his career, Lahm benefitted from Magath’s insistence on discipline, consistency and professionalism. Even more, it was Magath that first switched Lahm to left-back at Stuttgart, a simple act that partially defined Lahm’s career. The ability to play on both sides encouraged Lahm to vary between overlapping and underlapping runs, allowing him to gel with any winger, and set the foundation for the adaptability that spawned a short career as a midfielder.
Left-back was where Lahm broke into the German international squad, with both him and his good friend Bastian Schweinsteiger being the first of an emerging generation of German players in the wake of the dark ages of the early 2000s. The duo was present at the nadir, failing to win a single match at Euro 2004 but impressed. Lahm had experienced the low of international football, but just two years later, he was floating on cloud nine as he scored the first ever goal in the 2006 World Cup in Munich, his home city. He scored another important goal, this time, the winner against Turkey in the 2008 Euros, though his failure to stop Fernando Torres as he bore down on goal led to the Spanish triumphing in the final. This was to be the first of multiple near misses in his career – for both club and country.
Stubbornness – the First German Trait
Perhaps because of his passion for his home-town club, and these frequent near misses, Lahm has never been afraid to speak his mind. On one well-known occasion, he attacked the transfer policy and philosophy of the Bavarian giants following a series of disappointing on and off-pitch decisions. The defender had reasonable cause as club president Uli Houness had assured him – a few years earlier – of the intent to build a team that could challenge for continental honours like at the turn of the century. Lahm was always ready to stick his neck out too. After Germany’s (and Lahm’s) impressive showing at the 2010 World Cup, he responded to debate over the national team captaincy by publicly declaring his desire to retain the captaincy, even when erstwhile captain Michael Ballack returned to the fold. The gambit paid off on this occasion as Ballack rarely played for Germany again.
But do not see him as a troublemaker. His brand of leadership is a quiet one, honed through his experience captaining all Bayern youth teams, and from accepting the weight of being Germany’s youngest ever captain (26 years old) at a World Cup Finals. Still, some will consider him stubborn, even averse to protocol. His decision to unilaterally announce his retirement – despite the club planning a joint announcement – fortify this view.
A Paragon of Consistency
Love him or loathe him, one word can be used to sum up his career: consistency. Left-back, Right-back, Midfielder. Lahm’s consistency is of a rare variety, one paired with excellence. In fact, at one point, he lay claim to being, arguably, the best left-back, right-back, and deep-lying midfielder in the world. Such is his reliability that you can stick Lahm anywhere on the pitch and be fairly confident that he would thrive there. Schweinsteiger called him the “perfect footballer” while Pep Guardiola famously cited him as the most intelligent footballer he had ever worked with. And Hermann Hummels, his youth coach at Bayern and also Matt Hummels’ father, was so confident in the young man that he bullishly said, “If Philipp Lahm doesn’t make it in the Bundesliga, nobody will.”
Lahm’s consistent excellence is all the more startlingly considering he has thrived as a technician in a world of athletes. Though the full-back has always been a player that could run all day long, the last twenty-five years have accelerated the trend. Maicon and Dani Alves, widely considered the finest right-backs of their time, share the feature of playing more like wingers than defenders. Over time, the premium placed on athleticism and attacking drive has grown. Make no mistake about it, Lahm is a very fine athlete. But his game is about how he merges his stamina and agility with the technical and tactical aspects of the game. In this regard, he has as much in common with Sergio Busquets as he does with Cafu.
This unique skill-set is what made Lahm the most likely candidate as the first modern inverted full-back. Under Pep Guardiola, Lahm redefined himself, first as an inverted full-back and then as an outright midfielder. At each point, he looked a natural. This may be expected of a young player learning the trade, but Lahm was thirty when he embraced Guardiola’s position change.
Peerless
Added to his trophy haul, this act of changing perceptions of a modern day full-back puts Lahm at the top of the list of the greatest full-backs of all time. Indeed, many of his fiercest rivals are likely to come from South America. Amongst the great European full-backs – Facchetti, Thuram, Berti Vogts, etc. – Lahm finds himself in comfortable company. Perhaps posterity will judge his impact to be even larger than envisaged, depending on how the full-back position evolves over the next few years.
Lahm sure knows how to exit. Straight after captaining Germany to World Cup victory in Brazil in 2014, he retired from the national team. Now, he leaves at the age of just thirty-three, arguably still the best in his position. His status in history will always be debated. Better than Cafu? More influential than Carlos Alberto? Maybe, maybe not. For Bayern Munich fans, a more pertinent question is whether Lahm will stay at the club in a non-playing category just as the likes of Uli Houness and of course, Der Kaiser, Franz Beckenbauer. Knowing Lahm, no one would be surprised if he bucked the trend. For the Bavarians, it would be a huge loss. But their loss would be someone’s gain. And I wouldn’t bet against Lahm taking to his new role – whatever it may be – like a duck to water.