Lars Leese

Lars Leese
Lars Leese (2005)
Personnel
birthday	18th August 1969
place of birth	Germany
size	197 cm
position	goalkeeper
Juniors
Years	station
	SC Fortuna Cologne
	1. FC Cologne
	BC efferenes
Men's
Years	station	Games (goals) 1
1989-1992	Sports fans Neitersen
1992-1995	VfB knowledge	55 (0)
1995-1996	SCB Prussia Cologne
1996-1997	Bayer 04 Leverkusen	0 (0)
1997-1999	Barnsley FC	16 (0)
2000-2001	SCB Prussia Cologne	17 (0)
2001-2003	Borussia Mönchengladbach II	2 (0)
2003-2005	1. FC Cologne II	29 (0)
Stations as a trainer
Years	station
2005-2011	SV Bergisch Gladbach 09
2011-2013	SSVg Velbert
2013-2014	SSVg Velbert
1 Only league games are given.

Lars Leese (born August 18, 1969 ) is a former German soccer goalkeeper and today's soccer coach .

Career as a youth player

Lars Leese began his football career as a youth at SC Fortuna Köln before moving to 1. FC Köln . At 16, however, he stopped playing football for a short time because he lacked motivation. Nevertheless, he took up training at BC Efferen only a few weeks later, albeit without the goal of becoming a professional footballer, as he still had in his time in Cologne.

Career as a player

In 1989 Leese moved to Sportfreunde Neitersen in the district league Westerwald and from there in 1992 to VfB Wissen in the Oberliga Südwest. With his knowledge of VfB, he qualified for the newly founded Regionalliga West / Südwest in 1994 . After VfB's relegation in the summer of 1995, he moved to SCB Preußen Köln in the Oberliga Nordrhein , before moving to Bayer 04 Leverkusen in the Bundesliga a year later , but remained there as the third goalkeeper without a Bundesliga appearance. In the summer of 1997 Leese went to England for Barnsley FC , which that year surprisingly rose to the Premier League for the first time . He got his first job when the goalkeeper injured himself in the third home game. The highlight of his professional career should have been the game against Liverpool , where he secured the 1-0 victory.

At Barnsley he played a total of 20 games (1997/98: 8 games (1st division); 1998/99: 8 games (2nd division), 4 league cup games) before his contract expired in 1999. After he could not find a club for the 1999/2000 season, he spent the 2000/01 season again at Prussia Cologne in the major league, before switching to the amateurs of Borussia Mönchengladbach . After two years he went to the second team of 1. FC Köln, where he played a few more games as team captain in the regional league and was appointed as a substitute goalkeeper in Cologne's professional team in winter 2004. After the 2004/05 season, he ended his football career.

Career as a coach

From July 2005, Lars Leese coached SV Bergisch Gladbach 09 for six years , with whom he twice rose from the Middle Rhine League (sixth division) to the NRW League . In June 2011 he voluntarily finished his work in Bergisch Gladbach because he wanted to train a higher-class club. In October 2011 he became a coach at SSVg Velbert , with whom he was promoted from the NRW League to the Regionalliga West in the first year . After 18 months, he was given leave of absence in April 2013. Just under six months later, however, the SSVg brought him back as a coach after Hans-Günter Bruns was dismissed .

While it was unusual to bring back a coach on leave, Leeese's second leave of absence in Velbert, in June 2014, was even more curious: after relegation from the regional league in May 2014, club chairman Oliver Kuhn publicly announced that Lars Leese would seek promotion again. A month later, in the middle of the summer break, Leese was suddenly released. The club chairman of SSVg Velbert said: "The separation from Lars Leese is a painful step. Sometimes football is a dirty business in which we do things that we are very reluctant to do." One hopes for an immaculate restart through the change of coach.

Leese makes an extraordinary effort for an amateur trainer to further educate himself. He stayed at FC Barcelona and FC Valencia for one-week training courses. Since May 2009 he has been in possession of the DFB football instructor license, the highest trainer qualification in Germany, which would entitle him to train Bundesliga teams. In the summer of 2015 Leese took over the coaching position at DSK Cologne in the seventh-class district league.

"The Dream Keeper"

Lars Leese is a wider public, especially through the 2002 & Kiepenheuer Witsch as a paperback book called The Dream Keeper: The incredible story of a goalkeeper , he together with the sports journalist Ronald Reng become authored known. The book describes Lee's eventful career and tells the way from the county league through the Premier League back to the Oberliga. The story offers insights into the day-to-day business of professional football, especially in England. The Dream Keeper was often in Germany a best seller and the media with Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby compared, although both works are stylistically very different. Similar to Fever Pitch in England in the 1990s, Der Traumhüter is regarded in Germany as the book that made football socially acceptable as a literary topic. In 2004, The Dream Guardian was the first foreign book ever to be awarded the Sports Book Award (“ Sports Book of the Year”) in the Biography category in England .

Web links

• Lars Leese's website
• Lars Leese in the database of weltfussball.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Player profile at VfB Wissen
2. ↑ SSVg dismisses Bruns and brings Leese back. In: Kicker . November 5, 2013, accessed December 26, 2013 . 
3. ↑ Kuhn freaks out at half time. May 19, 2014. Retrieved June 19, 2014 . 
4. ^ SSVg Velbert separates from trainer Lars Leese. June 9, 2014, accessed June 19, 2014 . 
5. ↑ Lars Leese on his internship at Valencia CF "Nobody would do that here". In: 11Freunde.de. October 19, 2011, accessed December 26, 2013 . 
6. ↑ "Dream Guardian" in League 7: Leese coaches DSK Cologne. fussball.de, May 18, 2015, accessed on May 18, 2015 . 
7. ↑ Website of the British Sports Book Awards ( Memento of the original from January 16, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.