Lothar Matthäus belongs in almost every serious discussion about the greatest midfielders football has ever produced. That sounds like a bold statement until you actually think about what he achieved. World Cup winner, Ballon d’Or winner, the driving force behind West Germany for more than a decade and one of the few players who could genuinely dominate every area of the pitch. He was never the type of player people compare with Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo because they solved football in completely different ways. Matthäus was closer to Franz Beckenbauer or Zinedine Zidane in the sense that he dictated matches rather than simply finishing them. He could defend, organise, score, lead and somehow always seemed to appear when a game needed taking over. For me, he is quite simply one of the greatest No. 6s the sport has ever produced.
What has never made much sense to me is how little of that greatness shows up in the memorabilia market. You can still buy signed Lothar Matthäus shirts for roughly $350 to $450, even through established dealers like Icons. Those are respectable prices, but they feel surprisingly modest once you remember who the signature belongs to. If somebody with Matthäus’ career debuted today, collectors would probably be chasing photo-matched shirts, premium autograph releases and every limited edition Topps card that appeared. Instead, one of Germany’s greatest footballers remains oddly affordable.
Germany Talks About The TV Expert, Italy Talks About The Footballer
I sometimes think Lothar Matthäus has two completely different reputations depending on where you happen to be standing.
In Germany, he has become part of everyday football culture as a television expert. People quote his interviews, joke about his private life, remember the marriages, discuss his opinions every weekend and sometimes forget how extraordinary the player actually was. The public image gradually drifted away from the footballer and toward the personality.
Travel to Milan and the conversation changes almost immediately.
Inter supporters still remember the midfielder who dominated Serie A at a time when it was unquestionably the strongest league in the world. They remember the Ballon d’Or, the leadership, the authority and the years when Il Grande Lothar was one of the biggest names in Italian football. It is fascinating how one career can produce two completely different memories depending on which side of the Alps you ask.
The Timing Never Really Worked
I also think Matthäus belongs to the wrong generation from a memorabilia perspective.
His greatest years arrived long before sports collectibles became a global business. Clubs were not thinking about authenticated match-worn shirts after every Champions League night. Nobody talked about photo-matching. Social media did not exist. Auction platforms had not connected collectors from Europe, America and Asia in the way they do today.
The enormous explosion in sports memorabilia has really happened over the last fifteen or twenty years. Match-worn shirts suddenly became investment pieces. Signed jerseys started reaching prices that would have sounded ridiculous in the 1990s. Trading cards became a global market again. Matthäus had already retired by then.
Nostalgia Usually Wins In The End
That is why I keep wondering whether the market eventually catches up.
The people who watched Matthäus lift the World Cup in 1990 are now in their forties, fifties and sixties. They are no longer schoolchildren asking their parents for football shirts. They are the generation with disposable income, the generation that starts buying the players they admired as teenagers. You see that pattern all over the hobby. People eventually collect their own memories. Maybe that is exactly what happens with Matthäus over the next decade.
Not because he suddenly becomes a greater footballer than he already was. His career has not changed. The World Cup is still there. The Ballon d’Or is still there. Inter Milan still remembers him the same way.
Sometimes that is enough to move an entire market, and if there is one football legend whose memorabilia still feels undervalued compared with his place in the history of the game, Lothar Matthäus would be very close to the top of my list.
Image: von dominik hofbauer / Unsplash