Visit to Jupp Kapellmann for his 75th birthday

Hans-Josef "Jupp" Kapellmann won the European Cup three times with FC Bayern in the 1970s, later finding his calling as a doctor. On 19 December he celebrates his 75th birthday. Shortly before, FC Bayern members' magazine '51' paid him a visit and got to know a man who's still inquisitive.

No one ever used to escape him on the pitch, but today Jupp Kapellmann is distracted and Bosc has taken advantage. Bosc is his dog, black and large. At some point in the afternoon he sneaked off, and now his his master is standing on the gravel path in front of the finca, calling and whistling. His son and daughter and their fiancé have swarmed out to look for him. They scour the area by bike, scooter and on foot. "Once he walked all the way down to the harbour," says Kapellmann. The harbour is a long way away. Everyone is worried, hopefully nothing will happen to him.

Before Bosc ran away, it had been an unexciting day in Mallorca. Around Kapellmann's finca, the oranges on the trees glow in the still-warm November sun. Lemons also grow here, as well as mandarins, grapefruits, persimmons, pomegranates and olives. Two geese chatter, occasionally Asno the donkey brays, otherwise it's quiet. Kapellmann has created a little paradise for himself above Port de Sóller in the mountainous north-west of the island. He bought the finca a good 30 years ago. He looks around. The slope is still part of his property, as is the whole valley, he explains: "Sometimes I think that this isn't really my world. I come from the German middle class, my father was a bricklayer. It was the same with Franz Beckenbauer, he was a Giesinger, his father a postman. He wasn't meant for this world either. We were simply swept into it."

There is still a fair amount of disbelief when Kapellmann looks back on his life. He will be 75 in December and his first career, as a footballer, seems as distant to him as the sea that can be seen shimmering blue on the horizon from his terrace. There is nothing in his finca to suggest that this is the home of someone who won the European Cup three times, the Intercontinental Cup and the German championship with FC Bayern. He's also a World Cup winner. Only the people around him sometimes remind him of this. A neighbour once stood on his front door and asked for his autograph, Kapellmann recounts and still has to laugh today. The neighbour's name was Herbert Grönemeyer. "Of course I wanted his autograph too." 

More tangible for Kapellmann is his second career as a doctor. He was still practising until two years ago. In Port de Sóller, he cared for what felt like half the town. He provided the baker with an artificial hip joint and now he always gets bread for free. The gratitude of the people is the best vindication of his decision to become a doctor. "Being a doctor has given me so much," he says. He's also proud of his football career, of course, but football is nothing more than the nicest minor matter in the world. "What does it mean if you have a lot of money?" says Kapellmann. "Houses, cars, shares - that's not everything!’

Attack-minded defender

It all started with football, though, far away from Mallorca. The young Jupp played with his dad Hans in his back garden in the small village of Bardenberg near Aachen. "I had a typical career," recalls Kapellmann. He played for his local football club, made it into various representative teams and eventually signed his first professional contract with Alemannia Aachen at the age of 17. Kapellmann was a strong-running and strong-tackling right-back, who also liked to get forward. "That was new at the time in that position," he describes. By 1973, he was 23 and playing for 1. FC Köln, when Bayern came knocking. "I was a man in demand and, like Franz Beckenbauer, I had an offer from Monaco at that time. But Bayern wanted me badly." And he wanted Bayern. The Köln club doctor got him interested in medicine and he began a course of study, which he was able to continue in Munich. He even made sure it was written into his contact. "I made it a condition that I was released for exams," he explains. When he was allowed to return home early from a training camp or a trip to South America, it didn't always go down well with his team-mates. Especially because of his transfer fee: 800,000 Deutsche Marks, a Bundesliga record. "With VAT, it was around a million Marks," he calculates. "Gerd Müller always said: 'One million! That's madness!' But I couldn't help the fee."

He didn't let himself get irritated by it. For him it was never a case of football or medicine, but football and medicine. "It was in my contract, and I always performed," he says. "I always won the Cooper test by a distance, so there was nothing to criticise." He also had a supporter in coach Dettmar Cramer. "Cramer always said there should be space in the team, even for an odd character like me," recalls Kapellmann. "I saw it through. I didn't have to resit a single one of my 52 exams."

Visit from Beckenbauer

However, the ‘odd character’ already felt at home in the team. His medical expertise was called for and he was happy to pass it on, bringing along thigh bones, knee joints and once even a brain preserved in formalin, so that his colleagues could see it too. Kapellmann himself had two cruciate ligament ruptures and scaphoid fractures, and today he has an artificial hip. His first major injury occurred shortly after joining Bayern, in an international match against Austria. He remembers it well: a pass from Beckenbauer got stuck in the wet turf. Kapellmann tried to slide the ball away, an opponent fell over his leg and that was it. Cruciate, medial and lateral ligaments were broken. "I could no longer stand on that leg." He underwent surgery. "And the first person at my bedside was Franz." Who else, says Kapellmann. Because nobody looked after the team like Beckenbauer. "Our team spirit was the great achievement of our captain Franz." And without the special team spirit, the European Cup hat-trick would never have been possible, he is certain of that. "Everyone was there for each other, everyone performed. That's the only way we were able to master it with flying colours."

When Kapellmann talks about his six years as a Bayern player, he doesn't speak about the big titles, his goal in the Intercontinental Cup final against Belo Horizonte or his two assists in three European Cup finals. Kapellmann's mind is full of little stories, curiosities off the pitch. The fact that general manager Robert Schwan was the last to board the bus every time he left Säbener Straße because he always personally checked whether the office was really locked. That he and "Katsche" Schwarzenbeck trained like crazy on a sandy beach in Holland during a family holiday together. That Karl-Heinz Rummenigge once got severe stomach pains during a training camp abroad. He palpated him and it quickly became clear: the appendix had to be removed. Kapellmann was in the operating theatre and watched in shock as the surgeon calmly smoked a cigarette during the operation. Fortunately, everything went well. He has to grin. "I don't think Karl-Heinz has heard this story himself."

Following his time at Bayern and a short stint with 1860 Munich, Kapellmann retired from football in 1981. He was general manager at 1860 for a short time, but then called it a day. It was too much about the money for him. "It wasn't for me," he says. Instead, he concentrated fully on medicine. He qualified as a specialist in orthopaedics, became a senior consultant in Düsseldorf, opened a practice in Rosenheim and spent many hours in the operating theatre. Hip and knee prostheses, cruciate ligaments, Achilles tendons ... Kapellmann operated on everything his speciality had to offer. Then came an offer from Saudi Arabia. An opportunity to set up his own department and his own team appealed to him. "I had my life in Germany but it had become routine," he explains, "Saudi Arabia was a different challenge."

So, at the age of 60, Kapellmann embarked on a new adventure, learnt Arabic – his fifth foreign language after English, Spanish, French and Dutch – and stayed for almost eight years. The foreign culture with its very own structures fascinated him, along with the desert with its vastness and loneliness. "I made a lot of friends in Saudi Arabia but I couldn't live there permanently," he says. He returned to Germany in 2018, studied again (social medicine) and took on a managerial role at a rehabilitation clinic in Thuringia. However, he retired almost two years ago at the age of 73. "I thought about doing something else again, but then I thought to myself: what do you actually have a finca for? You don't have to slave away all the time."

Now he splits his time between Mallorca and his house in Rosenheim. Every day he cycles and tends to his animals and plants. And of course, seven children and his partner Angelika also demand his attention. He recently became a grandfather for the second time, with a third grandchild on the way. And then there's the ancient olive oil mill on his finca, which he wants to get up and running again. "You always have to set yourself goals," he says, "it keeps you young." Bosc, Kapellmann's dog, has also taken this to heart. In the evening, it's already pitch dark and he's found a few kilometres away. Dog and master have both understood: only those who look beyond borders can discover new things.