Gustav Manning

Gustav Rudolf Manning (also: Gus Randolph Manning , Randolph G. Manning ; born December 3, 1873 in Lewisham , London , † December 1, 1953 in New York ) was a German-British-American football official. At the end of the 19th century he was involved in the founding and management of football clubs in Berlin and southern Germany, represented several clubs of the southern German football association at the founding meeting of the DFB and, after emigrating to the United States, was co-founder and first chairman of the first national football association in the USA .

Life

Gustav Manning, born in the London suburb of Lewisham , was one of four sons of the Jewish merchant Wolfgang Gustav Mannheimer, who originally came from Königsberg in East Prussia. At the beginning of the 1880s he sold his company and moved to Berlin, but like the whole family kept the Anglicised name "Manning". In Berlin, father and sons joined the Berlin cricket club, where cricket and football were played. The sons Fred and Gustav played football in various Berlin clubs, including from 1893 at VfB Pankow, which was founded that year . Gustav Manning, who, emphasizing his English origins, sometimes called himself Gus Randolph Manning, made friends there with his teammate Franz John , who a few years later was to found a club called FC Bayern Munich.

Gustav Manning (front row, 2nd from right) with the Freiburg FC team in 1898

Gustav Manning completed a degree in medicine after leaving school, initially three semesters at the Berlin Humboldt University, then in southwest Germany in Freiburg im Breisgau . There he also received his doctorate in medicine. In addition to his work as an assistant doctor at the Medical University Polyclinic in Strasbourg , he played football for the Strasbourg FV . At the end of 1897 Manning was a co-founder, active player and first chairman of the Freiburg FC . After his return to Berlin he was active as a player and chairman (1898-99) of VfB Pankow.

In his role as secretary of the Association of South German Football Associations (VsFV), Manning represented several southern German clubs at the founding meeting of the German Football Association in January 1900 . Despite his British passport, he became the first secretary of the DFB and was entrusted with drafting the association's statutes based on the English model. However, he resigned from his position in October.

Manning emigrated to the USA in 1905 for professional reasons and founded the United States Football Association there on April 5, 1913 in New York , which elected him first chairman on June 21 of the same year. Gustav Manning became the first American to join the FIFA Executive Committee in 1948 . At the World Football Congress in Rio de Janeiro in 1950, he was instrumental in getting Germany back into the world association. His efforts meant that Germany was again allowed to participate in a soccer world championship in 1954.

Gustav Manning, who was inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame in 1950, died shortly before his 80th birthday. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery .

Paul, Fred and Philipp Manning

Gustav Manning's brothers, Paul and Fred, also born in England, were, like him, active in Berlin football. They joined VfB Pankow shortly after it was founded and convinced the young cricketers of the appeal of the soccer game.

No exact dates of life are known about Paul Manning. Fred Manning (actually Friederich; * 1871; † 1960), however, like his younger brother Gustav, was one of the participants in the DFB's founding meeting, where he represented VfB Pankow. He evidently devoted himself to sports reporting at an early stage and turned, in addition to soccer, to the sport of lawn tennis, which was budding among the bourgeois upper class in continental Europe in the early 20th century . Fred Manning was the editor of the first publication devoted exclusively to this sport The Lawn Tennis Sport , which in 1908 was renamed Lawn Tennis and Golf . Gustav's older brother was the stage and film actor Philipp Manning (* 1869, † 1951).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ancestry.com. United Kingdom, Naturalization Certificates and Statements, 1870–1912
2. ↑ The commemorative publication for the 55th anniversary of the Freiburg football club 1897-1952 calls him continuously "Georg" Manning (pages 10 ff.), Presumably because he was a player under the football names George or Dr. George ran up, cf. Team photo on page 13
3. ^ Heiner Gillmeister: English Editors of German Journals at the Turn of the Century . In: The Sports Historian No. 13, May 1993, pp. 38–65 ( online, pp. 11 ff .; PDF; 42 kB)

literature

• Jürgen Bitter : Germany's football. The encyclopedia. All names, all terms in more than 14,500 entries. With statistics and tables. Herbig, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-7766-2558-5 , pp. 465-466.
• Entry Dr. Randolph G. Manning. In: Carl Koppehel: History of German football. DFB (Ed.), Frankfurt am Main 1959, p. 320f.
• Heiner Gillmeister: The First European Soccer Match . In: The Sports Historian. The Journal of the British Society of Sports History , 17.2 (November 1997), pp. 1-13. ( online ; PDF; 440 kB)
• Heiner Gillmeister: The Tale of Little Franz and Big Franz. The Foundation of Bayern Munich FC . In: Soccer and Society , 1,2 (2000), pp. 80-106.
• Heiner Gillmeister, 100 years of golf in Germany. Albrecht Golf Verlag GmbH, Munich 2007, Vol. 1, Founding times until 1924, pp. 71, 110, 142, 145 f.
• Erich Eggers, Jan Buschbom: Forgotten Roots. Jewish football in Berlin . In: Dietrich Schulze-Marmeling: Star of David and leather ball . Verlag die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2003, ISBN 3-89533-407-3 , pp. 27ff.