Johannes Friedrich (soccer player)

Johannes Friedrich (born November 9, 1925 ) was a soccer player in Saxony . In the 1950s he played for both Empor Lauter and Motor Zwickau in the GDR Oberliga , the top division in GDR football .

In the early 1950s, football players made a sensation from Lauter, a town in the Ore Mountains with a population of 8,000 . With SG Lauter they became Saxon runner-up in 1950 ahead of the teams from the much larger cities of Aue , Plauen , Zwickau and Chemnitz . This qualified them for the new second-class DS league , where they were fifth in the 1950/51 season as BSG Freiheit Wismut Lauter, ahead of Chemnitz and Jena . A year later, the Lauterer football players managed to move up to the GDR upper league as BSG Empor. Johannes Friedrich was also involved in all the successes.

In his first league season, Friedrich was the standard half-left striker and played 24 of the 32 league games played. With 10th place out of 17 teams, the Lauterer fought safely to stay in the league and in the 1953/54 season they ended up with 9th place in the middle of the field. Friedrich also had a regular place in the team this season in his usual position and this time played 25 games out of 28 games played. Friedrich started his third league season again on the half-left attacking side and completed all of the first seven championship games.

In October 1954, those responsible for soccer in GDR sport decided to transfer the soccer section of the BSG Empor Lauter to the newly founded SC Empor Rostock . The players Espig , Hertzsch and Johannes Friedrich refused this plan and switched to the neighboring league club Motor Zwickau. While Espig and Hertzsch were only used in Zwickau at the beginning of the second half of the season in January 1955, Friedrich played for Motor Zwickau for the first time on November 7, 1954. He played a total of 17 times in the current season, after which he ended his career as a top division player. From 1952 to 1955 he had played 73 league games. He scored eleven championship goals for Lauter and two for Zwickau. Friedrich returned to Lauterer football, where he finally ended his football career with the lower class BSG Motor.

literature

• Hanns Leske : Encyclopedia of GDR football . Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-89533-556-3 .
• Andreas Baingo, Michael Horn: The History of the GDR Oberliga. Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2003, ISBN 3-89533-428-6 .
• GDR sports newspaper Deutsches Sportecho. Born 1952 to 1955