Franz Beckenbauer considered resigning as 2006 World Cup organizing committee chief in connection with a mysterious payment, a lawyer told a Frankfurt regional court on Thursday during a tax evasion trial against former German football top officials.
German Football Federation (DFB) lawyer Jan Olaf Leisner said Beckenbauer, who died in January, considered this move at one meeting because the matter "was getting too much for him."
In the trial, former DFB presidents Wolfgang Niersbach and Theo Zwanziger, as well as ex-DFB secretary general Horst R Schmidt, are charged with tax evasion because they declared a payment as operating expenses.
The charges centre around €6.7 million ($7.3 million) the DFB transferred via the world governing body FIFA to the late businessman Robert Louis-Dreyfus. The money was declared as payment for a World Cup gala which never took place.
Beckenbauer had received a loan of the same sum from Louis-Dreyfus in 2002, with that money ending up in an account owned by now disgraced former top FIFA official Mohammed bin Hammam of Qatar. It remains unclear what the money was for.
Leisner said that former star player Günter Netzer had urged the DFB on several occasions to pay the money back in his function as a business partner of Louis-Dreyfus.
Leisner said the DFB feared that Beckenbauer would quit as the face of German football and the World Cup.
He also gave detailed reasons for what the DFB considers to be the legality of the operating expenditure.
Along with Schmidt's legal advisor Tilman Reichling, he rejected the accusation that the money had been used to buy votes for the World Cup.
Senior public prosecutor Jesco Kümmel said he considered Leisner's statements on the business expenses "nonsense" and spoke of a possibility that the DFB had "developed a semi-legal model of corruption".
Netzer is to appear as a witness in court in May, and Kümmel said the prosecution also wants another former DGFB boss, Fitz Keller, im the witness stand.
He said Keller is to be questioned over contradicting statements regarding minutes from consultants Esecons as part of an internal DFB investigation.
Der Spiegel magazine and Süddeutsche Zeitung daily reported that Schmidt said in not authorised minutes that "it must be assumed that the money was used to buy votes."
Schmidt has always disputed vote buying allegations.
Another witness to be heard in April is Bayern Munich honorary president Uli Hoeneß who has suggested that he knows more about the payment.
The trial started earlier in March and is to continue until October.