Rebel United: Mario Basler - the Bayern Munich icon who 'drank beer until half-past-three' the night before the Champions League final

For Basler personally, the night after the final was similar to the one that preceded it. "I sat at the bar until half-past-three, when everyone else was already asleep," he recalled while admitting that manager Ottmar Hitzfeld and club president Uli Hoeness repeatedly urged him to go to bed.

"I said, 'No, I'm not going to bed, I still have to drink a few beers.'" When he had reached his 10th beer, Basler was finally told: 'Then you can't play tomorrow,' to which Basler replied, according to his own statement, 'Fine, then we can't win tomorrow'. In the end, he was still in the starting line-up and made his mark on the final.

Lots of alcohol, wild parties, pithy statements, confrontations with authority figures, top-class football, but ultimately narrowly missing out on the big triumph; the 1999 Champions League final had everything that Basler stood for.

Basler was born in Neustadt an der Weinstrasse in 1968. The name of the town fits perfectly with his later passion, although wine was always in constant rivalry with beer and spirits for him. And cigarettes, of course. Reiner Geye, the manager of his youth and favourite club Kaiserslautern, accused Basler of having an "unsound lifestyle" early in his career.

At the age of 20, Basler moved to Rot-Weiss Essen, and then to Hertha Berlin. "World-class up to his head," said Hertha coach Bernd Stange. "Above that, district league."

Basler finally rose to stardom in the mid-1990s at Werder Bremen. A DFB-Pokal winner in 1994, he was then Bundesliga top scorer the following year, partly because he scored directly from a corner on three occasions. In 1996, the inevitable move to Bayern finally followed.

Basler stayed in Munich for just over three years, winning the Bundesliga twice and the Pokal once. Above all, however, he became one of the faces of the legendary 'FC Hollywood', the name given to this collection of talented but ultimately incompatible egocentrics, such as Lothar Matthaus, Mehmet Scholl, Stefan Effenberg and Oliver Kahn.

Just as Basler scored dream goals on the pitch, he was involved in escapades off it. He would visit nightclubs while on sick leave and brawl in the streets. Hoeness hired detectives to shadow Basler while also imposing heavy fines on him. But 'Super Mario' was unstoppable. He lived his life and didn't let anyone tell him what to do.

A few months after the '99 Champions League final, Bayern finally ran out of patience. While recovering from an injury, Basler got into a late-night fight with substitute goalkeeper Sven Scheuer in a pizzeria in Regensburg. As a result, Bayern suspended him and Basler returned to Kaiserslautern.

"He could have become a legend here," Hoeness later said, wistfully.

At the age of only 30, this felt like a premature departure from top-level football, especially since Basler had already played his last international match for Germany a year earlier.

Just as with Bayern, he missed out on the crowning glory of his career with the national team. At the 1994 World Cup, Basler played 30 minutes against Bolivia in the opening match, then sat on the bench until the quarter-final defeat against Bulgaria.

But in the run-up to Euro '96, Basler was considered a key player for the national team, before his own team-mate Christian Ziege caught him on the ankle during training. Basler left England before the opening match, and his team-mates went on to win the title. Despite his personal disappointments, he has fond memories of both tournaments, as he does of the 1999 Champions League final.

"We were a close-knit bunch and had a coach in Berti Vogts who knew how to create the right mix of tension and relaxation," Basler said later. "We painted the town red in the restaurants, bars and nightclubs around our team hotels. We didn't want to get cabin fever! On those evenings, we emptied quite a few glasses of beer, vodka lemon or gin and tonic, smoked a few Marlboros and chatted about the finer things in life... Sure, we got tipsy sometimes – but never like the English national team players. They guzzled beer as if there wouldn't be any more tomorrow. It was crazy to see how much they drank. Compared to them, we were choirboys."

Basler ended his professional career in 2004, ironically while playing in Qatar, where alcohol is banned. Since then, he has held various coaching and administrative positions at various lower-league clubs, but has remained in the public eye mainly because of his pithy remarks.

Basler works as a TV pundit and also tours Germany as a comedian. His claims are always quite similar, that there are no real characters anymore and everything used to be better. Most recently, Basler made a name for himself with his increasingly absurd criticism of Bayern's rising star Lennart Karl.

If Basler had to play with today's professionals, he would "go crazy," the now-56-year-old once said. "They stand in front of the mirror for an hour, put gel in their hair, put on headbands. Then they come to training with their arms bandaged because they've had tattoos done and can't train for two days."

Basler, on the other hand, could drink and smoke and still play in the Champions League final. But what might have been possible if he had let it go?

Click here to read article