It certainly "took the fun" out of following the national team for German football fans in the 1980s (according to Uli Hesse in his excellent history of German football "Tor!"). The paradox is really that the team of this were fairly successful. After all, they had won the 1980 European Championship and were runners up in 1982.

In some respects, the perception of the national team was one of many factors turning Germans away from football entirely, which didn't reverse until at least the late 1990s. So the negative public perception of the national team came at a bad time for the popularity of football in (West) Germany more generally.

The domestic press of the time labelled it a "victory worse than defeat" and commented that "never before have German football fans been told with such directness that they shouldn't count on being offered matches worth seeing". And the players were unapologetic; after the game, Lothar Matthäus simply said they'd gone through and that was enough.

But this was one part of a broader narrative that the West German team of this generation were too focused on winning over everything else. The 1982 semi-final against France was generally received by the French media as the buccaneering French against the rough, hard Germans. The clash between Schumacher and Battiston in that game entrenched this depiction in the global media.

What had always been the case in West Germany was a "club over country" attitude that was partly driven by a taboo of nationalism and patriotism, but also a more regional than national loyalty (this would be echoed in the former East Germany from the 1990s, where loyalties to region or Länder provided a sense of nostalgia for some people). The 1982 World Cup came at a time when a number of fans who had grown up with the rebirth of football in the 1950s in West Germany were at an impressionable age, and the events of the early 1980s served to redirect fans back towards their club loyalties.

The context of professionalism in West Germany I think is important here. There was a sense of complacency in the DFB after the 1954 "miracle" World Cup victory that delayed the growth of the modern game. Germany did not have an openly professional league until the mid-1960s, spurred on by perceived failure in the 1962 World Cup and loss of players to Italy. Corruption, hidden payments and regulatory breaches were rife until the 1970s, until the league became more openly competitive.

By the 1980s, you had a competitive West German league but also a growing West German economy and middle class - bringing competition from tennis and golf (following the success of Boris Becker and Bernhard Langer). In the mid 1980s, West German football was on the decline and almost considered "finished" as the national sport, belonging instead to a working-class past or the distressed, industrial rust belt. Hooliganism had been slowly imported from England and elsewhere since the 1970s, and Bundesliga attendances were at all time lows in 1985-86.

The reverse in the national team would take some time and was very choppy; success in 1990 and 1996 came alongside woeful performances in 1992, 1994, 1998 and 2000. What really generated the renaissance in football support was the resilience of the Bundesliga, supported finally in the 1990s by a flood of new and old money - marketing, supporters returning to terraces, TV revenue and private investment into the major clubs.

One measure of how German football had turned around from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s in the public's mind is to consider that the success of Michael Schumacher and Jan Ullrich didn't present as much of an existential threat to the sport in the Germany as tennis did in the 1980s. By the mid-1990s, football was really back as the national sport.

Sources: "Tor! The Story of German Football" - Uli Hesse "The Ball is Round" - David Goldblatt