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The Gentle Titan

(Published by Spiegel on 23 April, 2022)

People used to say, “Only the fools end up in goal.” That’s why, as a kid, Manuel Neuer never wanted to be a goalkeeper. Today, he’s one of the best in the world. He explains how that came to be on a hike in the mountains above Lake Tegernsee.

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He’s taken a seat in the dining room, the so-called “Stube” on the ground floor. The walls are wood-paneled. A crucifix hangs above him. “Just like at home,” says Manuel Neuer. “I have one just like that there, too.”

That morning, he had taken part in FC Bayern’s training session, then had treatment with his physiotherapist, and finally drove from Munich to Bad Wiessee, where a mountain trail leads up to an alpine pasture along the way that he enjoys visiting. “Totally relaxed, no crampons,” Neuer had explained.

He’s now completed a three-quarter-hour walk. Actually, Manuel Neuer says, he [usually] wouldn’t even need to sit down after such a short hike in the mountains. But once he’s out here in the mountains above Lake Tegernsee, he wants to focus not just on sports, but on what he considers home—on the place he longs for, which gives him a “sense of well-being.” It’s not far from where he built his house a few years ago—a villa overlooking the lake with a so-called “Stube” featuring a schnapps case, wood-paneled just like here on the alpine pasture.

The menu lies before him. Lots of dumplings, lots of sauce, and above all, lots of meat—hearty Bavarian home cooking.

He knows the innkeeper, who is part of his Tegernsee “network” and used to be Helmut Kohl’s personal chef back when Kohl was chancellor and Neuer was still a toddler.

The innkeeper approaches the table to take the order.

A few years ago, Neuer began eating healthier, following a plan. Today, he bakes his own gluten-free bread and avoids red meat, dairy products, and even fish, due to heavy metals and microplastics. He says this has made him more productive.

Neuer reads aloud from the menu.

Neuer: Sour Lüngerl with pretzel dumplings.

Innkeeper: Sensational.

Neuer: Fleischpflanzerl.

Innkeeper: Also sensational.

Neuer: Potato and leek dumplings in bacon cream sauce (looks up from the menu). I think I’ll have something else. That vegetarian curry there.

Manuel Peter Neuer, born on 27 March, 1986, in Gelsenkirchen, has always known how to make the best of everything. He fits in anywhere, even in worlds where he doesn’t really belong.

He is currently the only global superstar in German sports. He is just as well-known in Bangkok and Cape Town as he is in New York or Nairobi. Football fans rave about his commanding presence, while Germans especially value his reliability. What sets him apart?

He grew up in Buer, a formerly independent town that is now part of Gelsenkirchen. It’s not a particularly wealthy place, but Neuer calls it the “Monaco of Gelsenkirchen.”

Manuel Neuer has been the first-choice goalkeeper for the German national team since 2010 and its official captain since 2016. He has made 109 appearances for the national team. Sepp Maier has played in 95 games. Oliver Kahn is next with 85. Since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, no one has been the national team’s goalkeeper more often than Neuer.

He has achieved virtually everything in his career. He’s a World Cup winner, a six-time DFB-Pokal winner, a two-time UEFA Super Cup winner, a two-time Champions League winner, and a nine-time Bundesliga winner. And if Bayern Munich wins its match against Borussia Dortmund this weekend, he’ll add a tenth consecutive Meisterschale to that list.

Before his hike in the Alps, Neuer completed his first run since undergoing knee surgery two weeks earlier, immediately after the match against RB Leipzig, which his team won 3–2. After that game, Bayern held a nine-point lead over second-place Dortmund. Just a few hours after the surgery, Neuer posted a photo on Instagram showing him with a thumbs-up, along with the caption: “Hey guys, I had a minor knee surgery today. Everything went great, so I can start my rehab soon. Keep your fingers crossed for me—see you on the pitch very soon.”

As soon as he walked into the alpine hut, the innkeeper immediately asked how he was doing.

Innkeeper: Everything okay?

Neuer: Everything’s great so far. I’ve already made it up the trail. Alone.

Innkeeper: That’s awesome. That’s great.

Just a moment ago, on the way up to the alpine pasture, he encountered a group of hikers. They recognized him and were surprised that he was already out hiking in the mountains again. “Hello,” Neuer called out to them, and, as if he owed them an explanation: “First try today.”

He now has to explain everywhere he goes why everything goes so quickly, so perfectly for him. “You can’t push yourself too hard,” says Manuel Neuer at the alpine hut. The wound healing went well, and if you’ve got everything under control there, you end up saving a lot of time.

He had always been very disciplined, even as a student. He had to catch the school bus at 7:00 a.m. and he didn’t get home until 8:30 p.m., four days a week. In between: school, football training. Lunch break. More school. Goalkeeper training. Homework help. Team training.

His day was divided into units—into many steps that were manageable in themselves.

SPIEGEL: Small steps, small goals…is that your formula for success?

Neuer: What makes you say that? I also said recently that we can become world champions again. Isn’t that big enough?

SPIEGEL: For someone who’s already been a world champion, that’s not an impossible goal.

Neuer: I set myself big, but also achievable goals.

Neuer never actually wanted to be a goalkeeper; he wanted to be an outfield player. He never had a goalkeeping idol.

Neuer played football starting at age five; later, he also played tennis. He says he could have been successful at anything. When he was not yet five years old, Schalke 04 was looking for a goalkeeper for its “Bambinis” (youth team), and nothing is bigger in Gelsenkirchen than Schalke 04. So Neuer forgot what he’d heard on the playground: “The dumb one always has to be in goal.”

Back then, he was “the little one” and a far cry from the 1.93 meters he is today. And the little one was always the dumb one and had to play in goal. “But,” says Manuel Neuer, “it wasn’t really that dumb to me.”

He was also lucky—the timing was right; the call came at the perfect moment. He hadn’t been Schalke’s youth goalkeeper for very long when FIFA adopted the so-called “back-pass rule,” a change that revolutionized goalkeeping. Since then, goalkeepers are no longer allowed to pick up a pass inside the penalty area with their hands; instead, they are required to pass the ball on, just like any other outfield player.

Neuer, the goalkeeper who had originally wanted to be an outfield player, took full advantage of the new rule more consistently than other goalkeepers. He saw it as an invitation to join the game and blurred the lines between goalkeeper and sweeper, while other goalkeepers, in keeping with the old tradition, remained on the goal line. He dared to venture beyond the goal area and beyond the penalty area; his forays outside the box grew longer and longer and eventually became legendary. For him, it was an opportunity to resolve the conflict between his desire to be an outfield player and his role as a goalkeeper.

And he believed in his great success, alongside Toni Tapalović, his friend and his current goalkeeper coach, who, like him, would have preferred to be an outfield player rather than a goalkeeper. Tapalović is six years older than Neuer; he joined Schalke in 1990 at the age of nine. For one year, starting in early 2007, he was Neuer’s backup goalkeeper on Schalke 04’s first team. When Neuer transferred to FC Bayern Munich in 2011, the club hired Tapalović as goalkeeper coach.

Tapalović says he, too, had repeatedly tried to become an outfield player, and that his own father had put pressure on him: “The goalkeeper is always the fool; he’s always to blame. You’d better go out there and score some goals. Something like that,” Tapalović recalls. “But then I realized you can combine the two—playing football [like an outfield player] and being a goalkeeper—that you can contribute to the game as a goalkeeper. Manu and I take risks that other goalkeepers avoid in order to look better; they’d rather not make any mistakes. We want to help the team.”

Less than a quarter of a goalkeeping today is done with the hands; the rest is footwork. It’s all about controlling the penalty area, passing accuracy, and running like any other outfield player. Goalkeepers used to run three to four kilometers per game; today, they run nearly twice that.

At the same time, Neuer is known for his spectacular saves and reflexes, such as in the 2014 World Cup quarterfinal against France, when he parried a nearly unstoppable shot from Karim Benzema with his right hand. But he owes his reputation as a modern goalkeeper, capable of contributing to the game, to his forays out of the box—which were perhaps never more crucial than in the World Cup round of 16 match against Algeria. On several occasions, he rushed out of the penalty area, thereby preventing a goal.

SPIEGEL: Oliver Kahn once compared a goalkeeper’s area of operation to a prison cell. Do you sometimes feel like a prisoner as a goalkeeper?

Neuer: My penalty area is a bit bigger [than his], though. I define my own territory.

He isn’t the first national team goalkeeper to lead Germany to the World Cup; German goalkeepers have always been the stuff of legends. “Football God” Toni Turek in the 1954 World Cup final against Hungary; Sepp Maier, the “Cat of Anzing,” against the Netherlands in 1974, also in the World Cup final; Oliver Kahn, “King Kahn,” with his saves at the 2002 World Cup—at least until he fumbled the ball in the final against Brazil.

But no one has filled the role of goalkeeper so elegantly. With Neuer, the image of the ugly German—the chance-killer in the German goal—vanished. While Toni Schumacher is remembered for knocking out two of French international Patrick Battiston’s front teeth, and Oliver Kahn for wanting to bite opponents’ necks, Neuer looks like an overgrown boy who, while no less dangerous, still smiles with a friendly smile.

Seven years ago, he shot a commercial for Coca-Cola in which he pokes fun at himself and his sometimes boring, seemingly harmless manner. He’s shown in a low-color scene, accompanied by melancholic violin music and the languid tone of his voice, which narrates from off-screen the story of a man who has come to terms with his dull life. Neuer says he’s an auditor at a large software company in Munich. He creates test plans and test reports, but he doesn’t get worked up. “I’m happy here as part of the team,” he says, “and I enjoy what I do.”

He talks about the bowling nights he spent with his colleagues, about the treble they won together: three bowling trophies. And you can just picture him standing at the bowling lane, full of enthusiasm. “I used to be a football goalkeeper,” he says, “I had what it took—the height, and I think I had the speed and the jumping ability. I think if I’d really tried, I could have made it as a professional goalkeeper.” He sits alone in the cafeteria, then takes a sip of Coke, and everything changes. He throws himself over balls and opponents and is suddenly a completely different person.

And you ask yourself: Who is Manuel Neuer really? The sensible, almost colorless person, the conformist who goes to work on time every morning, or the crazy guy in bright colors who flies through the air, whom we know from the “Sportschau”?

Manuel Neuer has done many things right in his life. At 24, he founded the Manuel Neuer Kids Foundation, and at 28, the Manus Youth Center, which cares for underprivileged children. He is the patron of the Frühstarter Datteln association, which works to improve medical care for premature babies and their families, and is a recipient of the State Order of Merit from both Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia, which he was awarded for his social commitment.

Off the pitch, he advocates for “Reds Against Racism,” an initiative of the Bayern Munich players. At last year’s Euros, he wore a rainbow armband to protest discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. Following the Russian army’s invasion of Ukraine, he took to the pitch wearing a captain’s armband in the Ukrainian national colors. There are no stories about him involving illegally parked cars or illegitimate children, nor has he ever said a single wrong word at any of the many press conferences he has given during his 17-year professional career. Bayern’s press spokesman, Dieter Nickles, says that after a defeat, when he can’t think of anyone else to ask—when absolutely no one wants to give an interview anymore, but he needs someone to say something—in the end, there is always “Manu.” He can always ask him, even in a pinch.

Manuel Neuer always finds the right words.

“A beer?” Manuel Neuer suggests at the alpine hut. “They have good beer here, too.”

The innkeeper approaches the table and takes the order.

“A beer?” Neuer nods. He sticks with water himself.

Does he ever do anything wrong?

“When I was six years old,” says Manuel Neuer beneath the crucifix, “I thought I already knew how to ski. I stood at the top of a mogul slope and skied down.”

Back then, he regularly went on ski holidays to Berwang in Tyrol with his parents and older brother. They stayed in a caravan; they couldn’t afford a hotel, but his father, who hails from Biberach in Upper Swabia, had always loved the mountains and the snow. And so it happened that Manuel and his brother Marcel, both from Gelsenkirchen, learned to ski at an early age. To this day, Manuel Neuer still skis regularly; most recently, he spent three days ski touring in Lech am Arlberg.

Back then, at six years old on the mogul slopes, he had overestimated his abilities. He fell, had to go to the hospital, underwent a knee arthroscopy, and was prescribed rest—so skiing was off the table for the time being. He spent the rest of the vacation sitting on a sled at the bottom of a slope his parents skied up and down. This way, he could at least see them occasionally.

SPIEGEL: Strange, how that could have happened to you. You’re such a cautious person, aren’t you?

Neuer: I’d say I’m [more of] a controlled attacker.

SPIEGEL: But that thing on the mogul slope was reckless.

Neuer: That was a kamikaze move. It was stupid.

SPIEGEL: How does that fit with who you are?

Neuer: I’m certainly brave. When I was 13 and at Schalke’s training camp, I jumped off a cliff that was 17 meters high.

SPIEGEL: What does that mean for your game?

Neuer: In my position, I’m a risk-taker.

SPIEGEL: In your personal life, too?

Neuer: I’m a realist and know what I can and can’t do. I’m pretty calm, good at assessing situations, and don’t really overestimate myself. I don’t have emotional outbursts and tend to observe a lot. And: I know what I want.

He returns to his accident on the mogul slopes—the time he was sitting on his sled while his parents were skiing up and down the slope. Suddenly, a man came by and took the sled away from him.

SPIEGEL: Who does something like that? Who takes a sled away from a six-year-old?

Neuer: No idea. Somebody who did après-ski.

SPIEGEL: Don’t you find that unbelievable?

Neuer: Of course. I cried about it, too. I was sitting there in the snow and couldn’t do anything.

SPIEGEL: Doesn’t that still make you angry today?

Neuer: Those were different times; it was 30 years ago.

SPIEGEL: What did your parents say back then?

Neuer: My father blamed me for not defending myself. With my ski pole.

SPIEGEL: How did you answer him?

Neuer: I didn’t understand his accusation at all.

He sits there, back straight, and nothing fazes him—not even a hint of insolence. “When another leading player says something,” Manuel Neuer explains, “I can argue back, but I can also just laugh it off. I have a certain composure that has nothing to do with arrogance.”

When he was 13 years old, Schalke wanted to cut him from the goalkeeper roster. They said he was still too short. Even his parents had said at the time, “Hopefully you’ll still grow.” He didn’t let that get to him. “I didn’t want to dwell on negative things.” He simply told himself that he would still grow.

He plays Schafkopf; he used to play with a regular group. Thomas Müller was part of it, along with Claudio Pizarro and Philipp Lahm. Sometimes “the physio” would join in, sometimes “Brazzo,” Bayern’s sporting director Hasan Salihamidžić, and sometimes Uli Hoeneß. “Schafkopf is a way of life,” says Neuer. “There are some real debates about whether you should have played the trump card after all, even if you’re already five games ahead.”

You can clearly see differences in personality, for example, between Thomas Müller and him. “Thomas is an aggressive player—an attacking player, basically,” says Neuer, “I’m more of a defensive player. I do take risks sometimes, but Thomas is different in that regard; even with a completely ordinary hand, he’d say, ‘I’m playing now.’”

He pauses briefly. Then he adds: “That doesn’t mean he wins more often.”

His calmmess can sometimes seem almost detached. But that’s probably his greatest strength. It allows him to do things that others might never have dared to do, not least on the pitch, as a proactive goalkeeper who takes more risks than his predecessors.

He’s been through breakups, with his wife Nina, for example, whom he married in 2017. But with Manuel Neuer, it’s always the positive images that stick. He makes it into the tabloids with statements like “Personally, he’s very happy” to be in Munich and would like to travel more again. Or with: “I’ve never been on a safari before—that appeals to me.”

With his calm demeanor, he achieves more than others do with their shouts. He is feared nonetheless—or perhaps precisely because of that. “When Manuel Neuer is in goal,” says his teammate Thomas Müller, “the opponents might have a different mindset.”

SPIEGEL: There are people who establish their authority by being loud and intimidating. You, on the other hand, are quiet. Is that your recipe for success?

Neuer: I wouldn’t say that. Felix Magath, for example, was always very quiet, very calm. When he said something, you had to strain your ears just to understand him. I’m not like that. I’m neither particularly loud nor particularly quiet. I’m just very clear in what I say.

"Bild" columnist Franz Josef Wagner once compared Neuer to a dolphin. And indeed: Neuer is likable, friendly, agile—he’s not the kind of person you can have anything against—a perfect national team goalkeeper in an era when first Angela Merkel and now her most recent vice chancellor are leading the country with the utmost pragmatism. Neuer doesn’t need the intimidating gestures for which Oliver Kahn was notorious. He’s neither too loud nor too quiet.

He always strikes the right balance. But he’s also someone who’s hard to pin down.

He was a member of the “Buerschenschaft,” Buer’s Schalke fan club. At the Parkstadion, where Schalke played at the time, he stood in the North Stand with the Ultras, and for away games he rode the fan bus. There are few professional footballers who were once true fans. He became the goalkeeper who hailed from the stands—a modern-day football fairy tale. It was impossible to imagine Gelsenkirchen without him.

Then came the offer from Bayern Munich, and Neuer, who had become virtually indispensable to Schalke, moved to Bayern—into a world in which he didn’t seem to belong.

Back then, he says, it wasn’t about money. “When I went shopping in Gelsenkirchen, I couldn’t just buy a pound of butter and six eggs,” Neuer recalls. “One Italian shopkeeper would get mad if I went to another. In Munich and at Lake Tegernsee, things are much more laid-back.”

He loves the Ruhr area, he says, but living farther away allows him to live more independently, to be his own boss—and that has always been important to him.

Neuer glances at his watch. Half an hour until the hut closes, and he doesn’t want to be the one who has to be escorted out. There’s still time for an espresso.

“That Helmut Kohl,” says Neuer. “Didn’t he have issues with SPIEGEL TV?” The other day, he saw a compilation on SPIEGEL TV about Kohl refusing to give an interview. He found it very funny. Kohl had asked the journalists, “Who are you with?” And when the journalists said they were from SPIEGEL TV and asked for an interview, he always politely declined.

“Thank you very much, thank you very much,” Manuel Neuer repeats. He smiles.

He’s amused by the politeness, which wasn’t meant to be nice at all.