Before Dietmar Hamann enters the studio, he sinks into a hairdresser's chair. He looks into the mirror in front of him, a brief quarrel, a look at the woman in the mask: “Please leave the beard a little longer. But without it looking unkempt. I look like Robber Hotzenplotz again.”
The make-up artist trims, combs, rubs oil into Hamann's beard. She brushes make-up over her nose, cheeks and forehead, plucks the part of her head into shape, shakes powder on it and sprays spray. Hamann's gaze follows her carefully. Not that anything goes wrong. Not anything else.
His suit has already disappeared from the wardrobe. At least it's no longer where he put it before the winter break. And the company that dresses the presenters doesn't yet have any suits in its range. So now Hamann is sitting here in trousers, sneakers and a dark blue cardigan with a little tummy pressed against him.
After ten minutes, Hamann looks at himself in the mirror one last time, thanks him politely and sets off in a less abrupt manner. He fiddles with nuts and gummy bears from two bowls, lets them disappear into his mouth, and briefly looks up at his colleagues: “Let’s go.”
One floor below, Hamann enters a large television studio, shakes hands, and has a little small talk with his work colleagues. The pay TV channel Sky records its major sports broadcasts here in Unterföhring. Hamann is given a microphone and takes his place in the studio. The broadcaster counts down. Camera off.
Hamann is asked about Franz Beckenbauer, “Franz,” as Hamann simply says. He has a lot to say about him. How Beckenbauer brought him up to the pros, back when Hamann was still playing for the Bayern amateurs and waiting for his chance. How everyone “hung on Franz’s every word,” even though he always set the training times so early that he could be at golf in time at two o’clock in the afternoon.
You can feel that Franz Beckenbauer's death is affecting Hamann. That it's not just any issue for him. Not just any 3-1 or a sloppy pass or a squeaky clean move or a debatable transfer.
All of this is routine for Hamann. He talks about this on 34 match days, mostly Saturdays, and on many other days too. He's been doing this for many years. This is how he earns his money: talking about football. Tell anecdotes. Players, coaches, clubs analyze, evaluate, criticize. Also appreciate, praise, cheer.
Football is actually a pretty simple sport, but over the years it has become more and more complicated. Constantly new rules, new terms, tactic variants that no one has ever heard of.
The hunger for understanding gave rise to the previously unknown profession of football explainer. Someone who sits or stands next to the commentators and moderators and classifies what is happening. He knows what he's talking about because he once played football professionally.
The list of football explainers on German television is long and illustrious: Lothar Matthäus, Mehmet Scholl, Mario Basler, Matthias Sammer, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Steffen Freund, Sandro Wagner, Michael Ballack.
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Every Saturday from 3:30 p.m.: Explainer Hamann in his element
Photo: Frank Bauer / DER SPIEGEL
But none of them are as controversial as Dietmar Hamann is. On Monday, after the matchdays, the newspapers are full of Hamann's rude comments. Or the responses to it. There is currently another argument because Hamann commented on a sentence from Bayern coach Thomas Tuchel in a pointed manner: Tuchel is "the biggest misunderstanding since Jürgen Klinsmann." What in turn made Bayern so outraged that they felt compelled to make a statement: "We will no longer accept such unobjective statements directed against our coach, which always come from the same place." Hamann later apologized.
The criticism of Hamann mostly comes from those criticized and their supporters. Hoeneß, Klopp, Tuchel, Baumgart. Hamann is a stubborn, disrespectful, ungrateful know-it-all and constant complainer who has no idea what he is talking about. Things look even more apocalyptic under Hamann's social media posts. But how did it even come to this?
Part of the answer can be observed this Saturday in January in the large television studio in Unterföhring. Hamann's face is dabbed again and his cardigan is freed from lint. He heaves his 1.90 meter height onto a beige sofa and sits down so horizontally that he is almost lying down.
Hamann will analyze games and transfers here in the coming hour. He will criticize: the transfer of Eric Dier to Bayern Munich, the poor finishing of Leipzig striker Loïs Openda, 1. FC Cologne, FC Bayern's attacking game. He will praise: Leverkusen midfielder Exequiel Palacios, FC Augsburg, 1. FC Heidenheim. It will meander between euphoria and bottomless disappointment. The words will be mentioned: “catastrophic”, “miserable”, “not suitable for the first league”, “sensational”, “world class”, “brilliant”. He will crack jokes, sometimes better ones, sometimes worse ones, he will have fun with the jokes of his Sky colleagues like a little boy. One of them's head turns red like a ball of fire from laughter.
What will appear in the headlines of the online portals in the next few hours:
– Hamann complains about Leipzig striker Openda: “My ears were whistling”
– Hamann doubts Bayern’s new signing Eric Dier
– Dietmar Hamann compares Eric Dier to an FCB flop
Hamann says: »Yes, my. Praise doesn't sell. I have no influence on that.” Period. Sometimes Hamann still gets annoyed about it, he says. But he knows how business works. He has been a part of it for three decades.
When Hamann thinks of his childhood in Munich in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he thinks of "school and football," that's how he tells it. Countless afternoons on the football field with his older brother. About his youth at Wacker Munich, where he played up to the A-youth level.
Today it is almost unthinkable that young talents stay with a smaller club for so long. But at Wacker Munich Hamann had everything he needed. A familiar environment, his friends. His father trained him. “He rarely received praise,” says Hamann. Didn't that bother him? Hamann answers as if he had learned it by heart: “Criticism is energizing, praise can make you sluggish.”
This is a typical Hamann statement. The content anyway, but also how he answers. Fast, precise, sharp, without hesitation, without doubts about yourself and what you said, without ums and ohs. As if it was all always inside him, just waiting to be called up like from a tape.
On a Wednesday morning in January, Hamann, whom everyone calls Didi, gets out of his Audi in olive green shorts and a red sports jacket. He walks the 50 meters from the car to a glass door over the announced lightning ice. Behind the door: locker room smell and eleven middle-aged men. Every Wednesday at half past ten they meet here in Grünwald in this gymnasium with the wood-paneled ceiling and curtains. Hamann appears sporadically. If his job lets him.
But today he directs, warns, praises, shouts, passes precisely, speaks a lot, dribbles little. You recognize the player Hamann once was. Few frills, few mistakes. Absolute reliability.
Even on this day, 13 years after the end of his career, Hamann still sometimes breaks out. Then he sprints off. It takes a while to get going, but then Hamann is like an avalanche that takes everything with it, opponents and teammates. Plus a shot like a horse. And after every second sprint: open your mouth, put your hands on your hips.
After an unusually long pause for thought, he would later say about his own performance in this game: “Good. A compact team performance to which I contributed my part." And about himself during his professional days: "Disciplined, tough, but fair. Sometimes bordering on unfair. I knew what I could do. And my greatest asset was: I knew what I couldn't do. I left that alone.« Hamann doesn't like to evaluate himself. As a player and as an expert. This makes him uncomfortable.
He doesn't really enjoy playing football anymore either. “It’s enough to make you sweat,” he says. His body no longer likes it the way he wants it to. And Hamann doesn't like half measures. He always wants to be the best at what he does. Or at least try.
He always had this ambition. As a teenager at Wacker Munich, later, after his move, at FC Bayern. Steeled by coach Hermann Gerland, brought up to the professionals by the Kaiser, baked by Trapattoni and Rehhagel. At 21, Hamann was a regular player and at 24 he was a national player. He won two championships and the UEFA Cup with Bayern, but was always in the shadow of others, Matthäus, Kahn, Scholl, Klinsmann, Basler, FC Hollywood.
New home in the north of England
At some point Hamann had the feeling that he was no longer making any progress in Munich. The mood in the team was bad. So he asked for a transfer. He moved to Newcastle and a year later to Liverpool FC. The seven best years of Hamann's career followed. He became at home in the north of England, watched his two daughters grow up, fell in love with the local people, their openness, their unpretentiousness. »They don't ask what you do. They don't care who you are. They ask if you want a beer and then you’re one of them.”
Hamann remained one of them for two decades. He won the Champions League and the UEFA Cup with Liverpool, and his teammate and friend Michael Owen gave him the nickname “The Kaiser,” which has stuck with him in England to this day.
In 2006 Hamann moved on to Manchester City. During this time his marriage fell apart. His wife moved back to Germany with their daughters. Hamann suffered from the separation and the loneliness. Hamann says: “Family is everything to me. My two daughters are everything.”
He drowned his frustration in wine, he says. When he couldn't sleep, and he hardly slept at night, he bet astronomical sums on cricket matches on the other side of the world. He often lost. “In a situation like this you have to make sure you don’t lose yourself.” Hamann staggered, but he didn’t lose himself. Football helped him with that. It became part of his therapy in these weeks. “And at some point,” says Hamann, “the sunshine came again.”
Hamann ended his Premier League career in 2009. He stayed in England, started getting his coaching license, learned under Sven-Göran Eriksson and was hired as head coach at fifth division club Stockport City. After four months, Hamann quit. He says half-seriously: “We lost too many games. That wasn't my fault. That was up to the players.”
But over time he also realized that he was missing something, as he puts it. What exactly, he can't say. But he wasn't the coach he had hoped for. And so he gave up the dream. No sadness, no regrets. Hamann is too pragmatic for that.
He then accompanied games for the BBC, analyzed World Cups for Irish television, and later also in Germany for Sky. And over time, my hobby became a profession. Suddenly Hamann was a “TV expert,” even if he himself doesn’t like the term.
Hamann noticed that it makes a big difference whether you say something in Dublin, London or Munich. “The British are much more rustic than the Germans,” he says. »They don't feel attacked so quickly. In Germany, criticism is very quickly taken personally.” In top-class sport, in a performance-based society, you are judged. You have to endure something like that, he thinks. It is the player who is evaluated, not the person. That's important to him. Where does he draw the line? “What I say on television, I want to be able to say to people in private.”
In fact, Hamann's principles are based on the exact opposite: distance. He says: »I have no contact with anyone from current football. And I don't want that either. Suppose I go out to dinner with a coach, drink two glasses of wine, have a nice chat, find him likeable, and the next weekend his team doesn't play well. And in my head I think: He's so nice, you can't say that now. This dependency would prevent me from doing my job properly.”
In Munich he is considered more of a polluter
This attempt at the greatest possible distance seems at least ambitious. In an industry where everyone is on a first-name basis with everyone else. The attempt is all the more ambitious for someone who has been part of the system for a long time. Hamann played at FC Bayern for nine years before moving to England. Officials in Munich today see him more as a polluter than a hero. At their long-term rivals in Dortmund, they have a similarly bad attitude towards Hamann. In this case you can also understand this as praise.
Hamann says: »I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity I was given at Bayern. But I rate them like any other club. I have to. I don’t owe Bayern anything and Bayern don’t owe me anything.”
Michael Leopold has worked with many TV experts. Leopold, a sporty guy in his early 50s, has been presenting for Sky since the mid-1990s, for more than 20 years. Franz Beckenbauer, Lothar Matthäus, Hamann, they all stood by his side. When Leopold and Hamann lead through the Bundesliga today, it sometimes seems like good cop, bad cop. Leopold, the charming buddy guy, Hamann, the biter who sometimes reaches out. “Sometimes,” says Leopold, “I have to go into the diplomatic service. But this picture of Didi constantly complaining is complete nonsense!”
Hamann prepares meticulously, leaves nothing to chance, watches countless games and summaries. And Hamann has also become much better at his craftsmanship over the years. Because he wanted to learn. His answers became shorter, more pointed. Less explanation loops, says Leopold. Less “calmundesque”.
What always remained the same: Hamann doesn't want to know before the broadcasts what questions Leopold and his colleagues will ask him. In order not to overthink his answers. Not a concept that Hamann invented. But it is unusual.
Michael Leopold is better connected in the Bundesliga than almost anyone else. He knows from countless conversations that many in the industry really appreciate Hamann and his style. But of course he also hears the opposite. »Didi is also a human being. Of course he's not happy about that. But luckily he has thick skin.”
What makes Hamann special: »Didi sees an incredible amount. And he sees it incredibly quickly. He has a mind of his own. He says what he thinks. And he is always open to contradiction.«
In an industry in which youth players are trained to avoid anything controversial or contradictory in interviews, someone like Hamann naturally stands out.
Sometimes he doesn't even shy away from contradicting himself. For example, he says that, as a Bavarian, he was conservative by birth, but he still doesn't believe in God. In England he would currently vote for the Labor Party. His favorite politician is Boris Pistorius, the defense minister from the SPD. He would rather take part in the protests of the last generation climate activists than those of the farmers. Hamann recognizes the contradiction, but he doesn't care.
"Clown", "fool", "clueless person"
Sometimes Hamann seems like a relic from another time. Then, smoking Marlboro Gold at the wheel of his huge Audi, he writes about youth training centers and the incapacitation of young players. About laptop trainers and word creations in modern football, “counterpressing,” “residual defense,” “switching moments.” About the fact that “science has taken over sport” and that sport is losing simplicity.
In his Instagram posts, people call him “clown,” “silly talker,” “clueless guy,” or “wink-wink Didi” because of the twitching eye he's had since he was a child. And these are rather mild words between all sorts of legal issues. Hamann says: »That leaves me cold. That makes me smile.” For him, that’s not just an empty phrase. "If you were to accuse me of partiality, that would affect me."
Hamann has no social media manager, no advisor, no one to take care of things for him. Since the end of his active career, he has done everything himself.
He only went to the police once. Someone had threatened Hamann that something would happen to him if he continued like this. That went too far for Hamann.
In the real world, he hardly notices any of the hate. It's all about autographs and a shared photo. Only at the Oktoberfest last year did someone drunkenly insult him. He said that the national team was doing so poorly because Hamann criticized them so harshly and called him in an "aggressive mood, something along the lines of an asshole."
He's not afraid. "I don't walk around the city or through the stadium with a hood and sunglasses." Hamann refers to his "thick skin" from his time as a player. When his mentor Franz Beckenbauer once insulted him as a “stumbler” and later took that back. When “Bild” mounted his head on one of eleven sausages when things weren’t going well for the national team. He himself: the “zero-bock-wurst”. That didn't excite him. Nevertheless, he says: "The criticism was correct in the matter."
Hamann moved back to Munich, to Munich-Solln, because of Brexit. A tranquil outskirts with magnificent houses, with squirrels whizzing through their front gardens in winter. Hamann finds peace here.
He lives in a pretty new apartment on the second floor with a view over the square, just 500 meters from where he grew up and where his parents still live. Photos of Hamann with his daughters and all sorts of postcards hang on the wall. Hamann has pushed some trophies so far back on the refrigerator that you can only see their tips.
Where does he see himself in a few years? Wouldn't he like to try being a coach again? “No,” says Hamann. »I am officially ending my career!«
He could well imagine continuing as before: talking about football. He's having a lot of fun with that. Nobody talks to him here.
In the big world of football, Hamann sees himself, if at all, in more of a strategic role, sports director, technical director, something like that. The biggest argument against it so far is: “Nobody has simply asked me.”