A-list A-frames - Olympiastadion München

A curiosity from 1972 - A-frames in Munich!

(Gerd Muller's hat-trick goal can be seen at 1.23.20)



Sadly, the rhyme or reason for their installation would appear to be lost to time.

They weren't installed when Bayern Munich won the Bundesliga on the last day of the 1971-72 season, and the standard Olympiastadion box nets were back for the Olympics later that summer.

Ajax were in the middle of their European Cup three-in-a-row at that time so perhaps we see the influence of Dutch football in the shape of the stanchions - check out PSV Eindhoven, for example.

They're awesome A-frames.

Just, what were they doing there?

Total Goalnets - AFC Ajax

It's peculiarly Dutch that the Ajax side which won three consecutive European Cups 1971-73 and a Champions League title in 94/95 had a home ground - De Meer - that was so small, big games had to be played at the city's Olympic stadium.

"The Dutch think innovatively, creatively and abstractly about space in their football," writes David Winner in Brilliant Orange "because for centuries they had to think about space in every other area of their lives." It's not hard to argue that no-one thought more innovatively or creatively about football within the cramped space of De Meer than Johan Cruyff.



You could find Continental D's at the De Meer right up to the club's move to Amsterdam Arena.

Total Goalnets - Eredivisie

Explaining the unique Dutch perspective that created total football, "Brilliant Orange"author David Winner writes that the Netherlands is the most densely populated country in Europe and that, "The Dutch think innovatively, creatively and  abstractly about space in their football because for centuries they had to think about space in every other area of their lives."

And in "The Ball is Round,"  David Goldblatt waxes long on the roots of total football, and finds them in total architecture - where Dan Roodenburgh, architect of Ajax' De Meer stadium proposed that the many separate elements in a building or project must be functionally and stylistically integrated into a whole vision - and the fine arts. Goldblatt argues eloquently that the "stripped down modern form (of Vermeer) can be seen in the abstract paintings of Mondrian who progressively reduced landscape and the natural world to the simplest elements of the visual arts - lines and blocks, horizontals and verticals, primary colours, black and white."

Both ideas can be seen to have come together in the Dutch on-field architecture of the 1970's, where simple, stripped down A-frames were designed to fit within the tight spaces of the cramped stadia that were such a feature of the Eredivisie at that time.

Total Goalnets - Eredivisie is a club-by-club review of Holland's history of goal nets of the era when the Dutch played the game in a way no-one had done before, and when Johan Cruyff was "Pythagoras in boots."

UEFA European Championships - Belgium 1972

In the '72 final at the doomed Heysel stadium, West Germany swept three past the Soviet Union into the Wembley look-a-likes.




Of more interest to us devotees of the goalnets, check out the semis' sexy curves at -

Antwerp (Bosuil Stadium)



Brussels (Stade Emile Verse)