Legendary coach Jupp Heynckes turns 76

"I'm at peace with myself and happy when I can enjoy my life in peace and quiet," Jupp Heynckes told German football paper Kicker in an interview marking the occasion of his 75th birthday last year. In 2021, Heynckes had a double celebration with Bayern Munich wrapping up the title a day before his 76th. 

"I have no need to be in the public eye. So much of it is so superficial," he added.  

Only someone who has been there and done all of that would say something like this; someone who has scaled the highest peaks but also gone through some really deep valleys, someone who has faced strong criticism but also been on the receiving end of the highest praise.  

"He could be an advertisement for sleeping pills," former coaching rival Christoph Daum once said of him.  

Former Bayern Munich President Uli Hoeness once described his close friend as "a model of ambition, will – but also humanity."

Jupp Heynckes has always remained true to himself, but at the same time he has always been learning and looking for ways to improve. 

A perfectionist  

Heynckes came from a family of skilled laborers. Jupp, whose real name is Josef, was the ninth of 10 children. His father ran a blacksmith's shop in the western German town of Mönchengladbach and his mother ran a corner shop. Both taught their son the values that he later exemplified as a player and coach – but also demanded of others: discipline, commitment, reliability and doing things the right way.  

"I am a perfectionist," Heynckes once said of himself. As a young man he served an apprenticeship as a plasterer in a construction company – and played a little football on the side.  

"Our company team was unbeatable back then," recalled Karl Bühler, the son of the company boss. Heynckes also met his future wife Iris while working at the construction company. They married in 1967 and later had a daughter together.  

World Cup and European champion 

By then Heynckes was already playing in the Bundesliga. As a youth he had joined Borussia Mönchengladbach and in 1964, the club's coach, Hennes Weisweiler, promoted the then 19-year-old striker to the first team. A year later, the side won promotion to the Bundesliga, which turned out to be just the start of big things for the Foals. Heynckes lasted 13 seasons as a striker in the Bundesliga, all but three of which he spent with his hometown club.  

With a total of 220 goals, he ranks fourth in the league's all-time list of goal scorers, behind Gerd Müller, Klaus Fischer and Robert Lewandowski.  

Heynckes won the Bundesliga title four times with Gladbach, also adding a German Cup and the UEFA Cup to his trophy case. On the international stage he made 39 appearances and scored 14 goals for West Germany, winning the European Championship in 1972 and the World Cup two years later. However, he saw little action in the 1974 World Cup, which was hosted by West Germany, as he suffered a slight injury in the preliminary round and lost his spot in the starting line-up to Bernd Hölzenbein, something he has described as one of the biggest disappointments of his playing career.  

'Introverted pedant'  

After he hung up his boots in 1978, he turned to coaching, first as an assistant under Udo Lattek, whom he later succeeded as head coach at Mönchengladbach. However, it wasn't at his hometown club but at Bayern Munich and Real Madrid where he would find success as a coach.  

He also coached Spanish clubs Athletic Bilbao and CD Tenerife, Portuguese giants Benfica, as well as Bundesliga outfits Eintracht Frankfurt, Schalke and Bayer Leverkusen.  

But not all of his players found it easy to deal with Heyncke's penchant for perfectionism. In an interview with German football magazine 11Freunde a few years ago, the late Wolfram Wuttke, who played under Heynckes at Gladbach, described his former coach as an "introverted pedant." 

"At one time I weighed 74.2 kilograms (164 pounds) and he demanded that I lose two kilos by the next game. On the Friday before the next games he weighed me again, and I was still 600 grams too heavy. Heynckes' turned red in the face and he made me pay a fine of DM100 (€51, $55) per 100 grams of excess weight. 

Treble with Bayern Munich 

Heynckes would go on to win four Bundesliga titles with Bayern Munich, the first of which came in 1989. With Real Madrid nine years later, he won his first Champions League. But just a week later, "Don Jupp," as he was popularly known in Spain, was sacked.  

Heynckes' greatest season as a coach came in 2012-13, leading 

Bayern to the treble of the Bundesliga, the German Cup and the Champions League – a feat that earned him the additional honor of being named Coach of the Year at the Ballon d'Or ceremony.

Speaking in an interview with last Sunday's edition of the Welt am Sonntag newspaper, Heynckes looked back fondly on that Bayern team. 

"We were a tightly knit group, so closely connected that we understood each other perfectly without having to say a lot," Heynckes said. "It is every coach's dream to take charge of and lead a team like that."   

Small celebration at home  

After that treble-winning season, Heynckes retired – but that first retirement turned out only to be temporary. In the autumn of 2017, he took the reins at Bayern once again, as a personal favor to Uli Hoeness. Heynckes delivered another championship title before he said "servus" for good. His last match was a defeat to Eintracht Frankfurt in the 2018 German Cup final. Since then he has been enjoying a quiet life on his farm near Mönchengladbach, where he may have raised a glass of wine this weekend with wife Iris.