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On the day of a World Cup final, it’s a bit of a myth that everyone calls you.

It was not like that in 2014, when we woke up in Brazil, ready to face Argentina.

The people close to you have already been in contact throughout the tournament, so nobody needs to write or say anything special. My mum always used to text me before every game. She did that day, before we played Argentina, but she would do the same before Bundesliga matches, too, and had done it all the way through my career.

But none of my friends wrote: “Hey, it’s the World Cup final today.” Nobody does that. You fall back on your routine — that’s what gives you certainty. After 112 caps for Germany and all those Champions League games, I didn’t want to change anything for my 113th game.

The big thing about days like that is how much they drag. All you want to be doing, all day, is playing football. Honestly, it’s been 12 years now, and I couldn’t even actually tell you in much detail what happened that day.

I have no idea what time I got up, but the rhythm was always the same: we had breakfast, we moved about a bit, then lunch, three hours before the match.

Lahm passing the ball during the final (Fabrice Coffrini / AFP via Getty Images)

It was clear who would be playing. There was no anxious wait for that, because the XI who started the semi-final against Brazil were going to start in the final as well. When you have a settled side, you don’t want to start experimenting in a final. Officially, we found out the team before we got on the coach and set off for the stadium, but there was no surprise.

I remember the bus journey to the Maracana. Again, you’re impatient in those moments. You just wanted to get there, get out on the pitch and warm up. I keep saying it, but it’s true: you want the comfort of your routine. But I was really looking forward to it. I don’t mean this arrogantly, but I remember thinking: I really believe we’re going to be world champions.

Yes, I remember looking out the windows, seeing the people and the atmosphere, but we were relaxed. Focused, but calm. You have to remember who we had in that team. Manuel Neuer, Jerome Boateng, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Miroslav Klose, Thomas Muller and Mesut Ozil. These players had played in big games for Germany before, or at the absolute highest level for their clubs.

It was important. Because it meant that we all trusted our own preparation. If you have won the Champions League, for example, then you don’t worry about whether you should be doing anything different. Should you be trying to sleep? Should you be eating something new? You don’t have that.

That’s true in the dressing room, too. I know it’s a cliche, but at that World Cup, every game from the last-16 was a final. For me, that was really the case. Privately, I had decided that I would retire from the national team in 2014, and I had made the decision the year before. Nobody knew at the time, not even the coach Joachim Low, but each time I played a knockout game at that tournament, it could have been my last time. Of course, I thought about that, but everything still needed to be the same.

People won’t believe me, but the dressing room at the Maracana was like that too. One of the players on the bench was shouting about this being our moment and needing to take this opportunity to become world champions, but there was nothing unique about those minutes. In sports films, you always need that special speech with the music. But when it really happens to you, that’s not true.

You want to keep everything that has taken you to that point in time.

The only difference was out on the pitch during the warm-up, when it became clear that Sami Khedira would not be able to play. He had been carrying an injury, and he had gone as far as he could. When that happened, Jogi Low, Bastian and I gathered together. Thomas (Muller) came over too. They asked whether I wanted to move and play No 6 in place of Sami. And I said straight away: no, we shouldn’t change too much, only a like-for-like change — and that’s how Christoph Kramer came in from the start.

There was a thought about whether someone else should start, someone more attacking, such as Mario Gotze or Andre Schurrle. But for me, it was clear: better to keep it one-for-one and bring in another holding midfielder.

For me, that was important, and it made a difference. If I had suddenly had to reorganise half an hour before the game and was no longer playing my usual position — right-back, as I had in the quarter-final and semi-final — but moved into the middle instead, then that wouldn’t have helped the team or me.

What’s important to understand is that even a game like that feels normal once it kicks off. You’re not conscious the whole time that a trophy’s at stake. There were phases — near the end, for instance, or after Mario scored — when it became clear exactly how much was on the line, but fundamentally it’s like any other game: you want to win your duels, help the team, keep a clean sheet — everything you’d do anyway. There’s no inner voice constantly shouting that this is a World Cup final.

People on the outside always assume that a final should be special. When they ask you about it, that’s what they want to hear. But I’d actually say it would be a bad sign if something unusual did happen, because you’d be throwing out all the processes that have helped build your team and put you in that position in the first place.

What does it feel like to win the World Cup — to actually hold the trophy?

Doing that for your country is something very few people ever get to do; it’s a moment you can barely describe.

When I got that chance, when it was actually handed to me, I didn’t think about how many people were watching or what the occasion meant. It wasn’t really like that. Not for me.

As I was lifting it, I thought about everything that I had put into getting there. All the way back to when I joined Bayern Munich, when I was just a boy, and how each year we would have to win our place back in the academy for the season after.

Lahm thought back on his career when he took the trophy from Brazil President Dilma Rousseff (Clive Rose/Getty Images)

I don’t remember ever thinking about winning the World Cup back then. Why would I? It was too big a dream. I just wanted to make it as a footballer. Then I wanted to play for Bayern, then for my country.

One day, you find yourself standing there, and someone is handing you the World Cup.

That 2014 team had suffered together. We had won a lot of matches, but we had lost a lot of important ones too, and so my mind was full of all these memories from the years we had spent together. When we lost to Italy in Dortmund in 2006. To Spain in Vienna in 2008 and in South Africa in 2010. And then, when we lost to Italy in 2012 in the European Championship.

Those were tough, tough times that could have broken teams. With each tournament, we had been under more pressure. Were we the generation that couldn’t win?

But then, at last, you’re together with all those same team-mates — friends, really — and in those seconds, you think: finally, finally it’s ours.

You are a world champion.

This article is part of our Style of Play series, an exploration of World Cup kit culture. 

It’s too early to judge how we will remember the 2026 World Cup.

Yet before it, each World Cup carries its own aesthetic: this has become homogenised over the last decade, but the chances are that if you were to show most football obsessives a still image from any tournament in history, without any other context, they would be able to identify the year just from how it looked.

Much of that is governed by the kits.

Great World Cup kits become associated with great World Cup moments and great World Cup players. Picture Marco Tardelli wheeling away in crazed celebration in Italy’s Azzurri blue in 1982 or Ahn Jung-hwan scoring against Italy wearing that striking South Korean white and red in 2002, or Lionel Messi sinking to his knees at the end of the 2022 penalty shootout, clad in Argentina’s sky blue and white stripes, the same design in which Diego Maradona won the 1986 World Cup.

These shirts leave a legacy: whether that’s purely aesthetic, or whether they represent a broader cultural moment, or are even associated with epochal political or social events. The enduring impact left by the World Cup’s greatest kits can go in many different directions.

Probably the most iconic World Cup shirt of them all sprang from national trauma.

When Brazil were beaten in the final match of the 1950 World Cup by Uruguay, a game played in the Maracana in Rio de Janeiro and one that the entire country assumed they would win, the nation went into shock and mourning. The Brazilian playwright Nelson Rodrigues called it “our catastrophe, our Hiroshima”.

Which might be a little over the top but such was the emotional impact of the defeat, a rebirth of some description was demanded. The newspaper Correio da Manha said the white shirts they wore represented “psychological and moral lack of symbolism”, and launched a competition to design a new one: the only stipulation being that it be based on the colours of the Brazilian flag.

The competition was won by a 19-year-old newspaper illustrator called Aldyr Garcia Schlee, who methodically put the yellow, green, blue and white into the most striking combinations he could, eventually ending up with the shirt we know today: yellow shirt with green trim, blue shorts, white socks. They have worn it at every World Cup since 1954, and it became, in the words of Schlee, “a symbol of the whole nation, not just football”.

Beyond Brazil, only a few other kits in sport compare: the New Zealand All Blacks, the New York Yankees pinstripes, the red of Ferrari, the white of Real Madrid, the Tour de France yellow jersey… but not much beyond that.

Brazil went on to win four of their five World Cups in that golden shirt, the exception being 1958, when, for whatever reason they didn’t bother to bring a change strip to Sweden, so when they faced the hosts in the final, they needed a Plan B. White couldn’t be considered, so someone went to a sports shop in Stockholm and bought a set of collared blue T-shirts, onto which the national crest was stitched. That blue has, for the most part, remained their away kit ever since. Only this week, someone paid $4.9million for Pele’s shirt from that final.

Two World Cups are probably most associated with the yellow Brazil shirt: one is 1970, partly because that is generally considered the greatest of all Brazil’s great teams, but also partly because it was the first World Cup to be broadcast entirely in colour. Admittedly, it was slightly grainy colour for most but the brilliant yellow helped punch through the fog of poor signal and sear itself into the minds of anyone who watched.

And the other is one Brazil didn’t actually win: the shirt for 1998 is one of the most beloved designs ever, partly because it was worn by Ronaldo at the peak of his abilities (if not the peak of his actual World Cup performance), but also because it pierced the general culture so much, not least through the famous Nike airport advert.

Brazil might have lost the 1998 World Cup final, but their kit became iconic (Stu Forster/Allsport/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Not far behind Brazil’s yellow in the iconic kits stakes is the orange of the Netherlands. The Dutch first qualified in 1934 but only played one game (it was a straight knockout format — they were beaten by Switzerland) in which they wore blue. Curiously, when they did wear orange for the first time in 1938, they did so at exactly the same time as the Dutch East Indies: that’s the name Indonesia used to go by when they were a Dutch colony, and as such also wore orange. All of the first-round games that year were scheduled at the same time, so they both sported that colour simultaneously.

The legacy of the Dutch orange is almost more emphatically felt off the pitch than on it: the sight of thousands of their fans, all in their orange uniforms, is one of the most striking in the game, particularly during their marches to the stadium.

And not far behind them is Croatia. Their wonderful checkerboard motif was designed by an avant-garde painter called Miroslav Sutej, who, after the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, not only created a shirt for the newly independent football team but also the nation’s coat of arms. The checkerboard has been a long-standing national symbol of Croatia, the origin of which remains slightly unclear, with several stories that date back 1,000 years.

When Croatia came third at the 1998 World Cup, with Davor Suker winning the Golden Boot, it not only created an iconic design but came to symbolise the still relatively new independence of the country. It has endured ever since, and while there have been occasional missteps in terms of how the checkerboard design is used on their shirts, it remains among the most distinctive at any World Cup.

Croatia’s checkerboard shirts are unique and a symbol of a nation that became independent in 1991 (Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images)

The France shirt from 1998 is similar in that it has a resonance beyond football, just in a different way. The design was inspired by the shirt they wore when winning Euro 1984 and in turn would go on to influence future shirts in 2010 and 2020, but it became intrinsically associated with the feeling of hope and unity that came with France’s victory on home soil.

The team — drawn from all areas of French society and symbolised by Zinedine Zidane, who has Algerian roots, and Marcel Desailly, Lilian Thuram and Thierry Henry — briefly seemed to convince people that racism had been solved in France.

“What better example of our unity and diversity than this magnificent team?” said Prime Minister Lionel Jospin at the time.

If that sense of unity existed, it was temporary: as an editorial in the newspaper Liberation put it, it was ultimately an “illusion utile” — a “useful illusion”, something proved right by a cursory glance at French politics and race relations in the intervening years.

Still, for a while, that shirt became a powerful symbol associated not just with sporting success and a French team that, the odd blip aside, has been one of the key players at most World Cups since, but also a broader hope for something better beyond football.

France’s 1998 World Cup-winning strip was hailed as a unifying symbol (Thomas Coex/AFP via Getty Images)

West Germany’s shirt for the 1990 World Cup has a case to be the most influential individual kit of all time in terms of how it opened things up design-wise. International jerseys before that simply weren’t particularly adventurous. Before that, beyond occasional outliers (Denmark in 1986, for example, or perhaps England’s in 1982), as a rule international shirts tended to be fairly plain, in that country’s traditional colours.

This was different. They actually very nearly didn’t wear the shirt in 1990: they had used the same design at Euro 88 and Adidas were in the process of bringing together a new one, but German manager Franz Beckenbauer intervened to suggest they stick with the old jersey.

It probably had something to do with designer Ina Franzmann’s background in women’s fashion: she told the BBC’s Sporting Witness podcast that Adidas were looking for fresh ideas, so hired her to come up with something different. Inspired by the colours of the German flag, Franzmann wanted to ensure the design “had an upward tendency”, going from one shoulder up to the other, in geometric shapes, that “symbolised winning”.

Initially, it wasn’t especially popular, considered too flashy, but it became a classic in later years. Such is its enduring appeal that Germany have released tributes to it twice in the last decade. Their shirt for the 2018 World Cup was a greyed-out version of the same design, while the one for 2026 was a reinterpretation; the diamond joins shifted into the middle of the chest rather than on either side. It was the only way Adidas could go out: from 2027, Germany’s kits will be made by Nike.

The geometric shirt West Germany wore while winning the 1990 World Cup has been reimagined multiple times (Daniel Garcia/AFP via Getty Images)

The Zaire shirt in 1974 left a legacy for African kits of the future, although perhaps those inspired by it wouldn’t want to admit the source of their inspiration. The design was striking: a green shirt with a massive, roaring leopard’s head on the front. The only slight catch being that it was, so the legend goes, designed in part by the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

Still, if you can overlook that, it did set an enjoyable precedent: several Cameroon kits over the years have featured massive lions, as did Senegal’s a few years ago, and Mali’s for the 2024 Africa Cup of Nations took this motif to extremes with a colossal eagle adorning the chest.

Some kits leave a legacy in how not to do things. At the very first World Cup in 1930, Bolivia attempted to curry favour with the hosts by wearing shirts with large single letters on the front that, when the team lined up in the appropriate order, spelt out ‘Viva Uruguay’. The trouble was it was great for the team photo, not so much when the players scattered around the pitch, meaning the 11 players just looked like a mass anagram challenge.

Dozens of other kits down the years have left a largely aesthetic legacy: Denmark 1986, USA 1994, Nigeria 2018, Japan 2022, Peru 1978, the USSR’s black goalkeeper jersey from 1962, England 1990. We could go on.

The point is that football shirts, especially at the World Cup, can matter on any number of levels.

The Style of Play series is sponsored by the Active Cash Visa® Credit Card from Wells Fargo.

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