If you look at it soberly, it’s just an old piece of fabric. But this Adidas jersey in size L with a material mix of 50 percent polyester, 35 percent cotton and 15 percent viscose achieved worldwide fame. Andreas Brehme wore it on July 8, 1990 at the Olympic Stadium in Rome when he scored the penalty in the 85th minute to win 1-0 against Argentina. This meant that Germany became football world champions for the third time.
Brehme hit the bottom left. He turned around on the spot, clenched his fists in a zigzag run, jumped into the air and was buried under the cheering teammates Jürgen Klinsmann, Rudi Völler, Pierre Littbarski and Stefan Reuter. In the year of reunification, this World Cup title was something very special for Germany; Brehme’s jersey with the number 3 on the back is steeped in history. You can definitely still smell it 34 years later. But Manuel Neukirchner contradicts: “No, you don’t smell anything anymore – at least no sweat.”
An Argentine collector laid out the last of the four World Cup jerseys in the museum
On the previous Tuesday, October 1, 2024, an Argentine collector named Yael Rodriguez, wearing white fabric gloves, spread Brehme’s 34-year-old jersey on a table in the bistro of the German Football Museum in Dortmund. The Neukirchner museum director also wore white gloves and touched the jersey reverently. The 56-year-old no longer expected that he would ever get this piece of material in his museum. He had thought it was lost. And when you suddenly hold one of the most important pieces of German football history in your hands, it can get emotional.
Helmut Rahn’s World Cup jersey from 1954, Gerd Müller’s World Cup jersey from 1974 and Mario Götze’s World Cup jersey from 2014 have been in the museum for a long time. You can see the shirts of these three winning final scorers in Dortmund. Only Brehme’s 1990 shirt was missing for 33 years. Not even Brehme himself, who died last February at the age of 63, had known in all this time whether his jersey still existed – and if so, where. He apparently had no memory of what else had happened during the night in Rome.
It was only towards the end of last year that it unexpectedly emerged: Brehme’s shirt, along with other German jerseys, had been flown to Argentina in 1990 as an exchange item with the opposing team. The jerseys were apparently distributed to airline employees after landing, so Brehme’s would have been in some Argentine closet for more than three decades. Back then, the names weren’t even on the jerseys.
At some point the jersey was offered to the collector Rodriguez, he checked its authenticity and put it up for auction at the online auction house “Matchday Auctions” in December 2023. The starting price was 105,000 US dollars, the appropriate value was even estimated at 300,000 to 400,000 US dollars. But no buyer was found, not at this price.
Mario Götze’s jersey came to the museum after just one year
“This jersey is probably more important in Germany than for international collectors,” suspects Neukirchner. After the auction failed, the experts from the Dortmund Museum checked it remotely using photos and films and many details, as well as comparing it with an existing Guido Buchwald World Cup jersey from 1990 and with the help of the Adidas “History Management” department Authenticity of the jersey – and they finally made an offer to the auction house. Neukirchner does not want to reveal how much; this has been agreed upon with the auction house. “We had a pain threshold,” he says, “and they agreed to that.” Whether this sum was five figures or even six figures – for a place in a showcase at the German Football Museum, the ideal value can hardly be quantified either way , especially because the collection of the four World Cup title scorer jerseys is finally complete.
The jersey with which Gerd Müller helped Germany win the title in Munich in 1974 appeared in a small private football museum in the Dutch city of Middelburg in 2012. The owner is Müller’s opponent at the time, Wim Rijsbergen. Neukirchner made contact, Rijsbergen was understanding and cooperative and made Müller’s shirt available on permanent loan to the football museum in Germany.
The jersey with which Mario Götze became the title scorer in Rio de Janeiro in 2014 was the easiest to obtain. Götze kept it and made it available to the museum on permanent loan that same year. When the museum opened in 2015, Dortmund already had two of the four most important World Cup jerseys.
It took until 2020 before Helmut Rahn’s ’54 jersey found its way into the museum. Rahn’s family had already provided the museum with the shoe with which the boss, coming from the background, scored perhaps the most famous of all goals in the history of German football in Bern. When Rahn’s family realized during a visit to the museum in what historical and at the same time socially relevant context the exhibits were arranged there, they also made the shirt available as a permanent loan.
The jersey wasn’t that incredibly important to Brehme, says the museum director
As of 2020, three of the four jerseys were on display. But there were only three. Only now are all four complete.
From now on, Brehme’s jersey hangs in a display case on the first floor of the museum. It’s initially only hanging there for the next two weeks, which is how long the autumn holidays are in North Rhine-Westphalia. Afterwards it will disappear into the safe again, because in October 2025, when the football museum turns ten years old, Brehme’s jersey will be given a special presentation together with the other three World Cup winning goalscorer jerseys and the four World Cup final balls from 1954, 1974 and 1990 and 2014. The museum has them all together too. Brehme’s jersey and the two balls from 1974 and 1990 are the most valuable of the approximately 1,600 exhibits in the museum – measured in terms of the purchase price. But of course the totals are all, well, shh!
Museum director Neukirchner says he was friends with Brehme for a long time. Understandably, he thinks it’s a shame that Brehme wasn’t able to see his jersey return to Germany. “But the matter of the jersey wasn’t really that important to him,” says Neukirchner. “What was much more important to him was that we included him in the founding eleven here in the German Football Hall of Fame – that really helped him means an incredible amount.”
Brehme’s partner Susanne Schaefer has announced that she wants to come to the football museum and look at the jersey. Of course, for them too, it’s not just a piece of material. Really no one can just look at it soberly.
