Michael Braun (soccer player, 1951)

Michael Braun (born December 29, 1951 ) was a soccer player in the GDR . In the top football league , he played for FC Karl-Marx-Stadt and Sachsenring Zwickau . With the Sachsenring team, he won the GDR Cup in 1975 .

Soccer career

FC Karl-Marx-Stadt

The 1.72 m tall offensive midfielder Braun, who earned his sports teacher diploma while he was still active, took many years to establish himself in the GDR's top division. At first his football career got off to a promising start, because as a junior player for the top West Saxon club FC Karl-Marx-Stadt, he was part of the GDR junior national team in 1969. With her he played four internationals in which he was called up as a striker. Braun completed his first games in the men's division in the second-rate GDR league , to which FCK was relegated in 1970. Braun was involved in the immediate resurgence with 20 stakes and three goals. He made his first attempt to become a league player in the 1971/72 season. However, it was only enough for a 45-minute appearance on the 5th matchday, October 2, 1971. During the encounter between FCK and Lok Leipzig (1: 2), the 21-year-old Braun was in the 46th minute for the right winger Karl- Heinz Zeidler came on as a substitute. During his service with the NVA he played from 1971 to 1974 with the second-class top team, ASV Vorwärts Leipzig.

Sachsenring Zwickau

In November 1974, Braun moved to the district rival Sachsenring Zwickau, which was also represented in the major league as the company sports association of the car manufacturer of the same name. There he benefited from the fact that at the beginning of 1975, Heinz Wohlrabe and Hartmut Rentzsch, two regular players were eliminated from the top division squad. After a 45-minute deployment on November 30, 1974 as a substitute in the point game Sachsenring - Vorwärts Stralsund (4-0), Braun played in the second half of the 1974/75 season in all league games in which he was used as a central midfielder.

At the end of the 1974/75 season, Sachsenring Zwickau won the GDR soccer cup for the third time in its history. Braun had only participated in the two semi-final games against Wismut Aue (1: 0, 1: 2), but was back on June 14, 1975 as the central midfielder in the final against Dynamo Dresden. Braun initially had a difficult time and seemed overwhelmed in the game structure. In the 65th minute he caused the Dresden opener through a positional error. It was only when the Zwickau team stepped up their game after falling behind that Braun also got better into the game and became the driving force behind his team, which ultimately won the FDGB Cup after a 4-3 win on penalties. As surprising as the Zwickau team won the cup against their favorite Dynamo Dresden, they also surprised in the subsequent games in the 1975/76 European Cup . They eliminated such prominent teams as Fiorentina and Celtic Glasgow and only failed in the semi-finals against RSC Anderlecht with 0: 3 and 0: 2. Braun were used in all eight European Cup games, mainly as a striker due to the absence of Peter Nestler .

In the following seasons, Braun remained a regular in the Sachsenring team as a midfielder. He completed his most intense league season in 1976/77, in which he played all 26 point games and with four goals was also one of the most accurate players of his team (only Nestler was more successful with six goals). Braun played the last league season in 1979/80. The now 29-year-old only played eleven point games, in which he was mostly used as a substitute. He had his last appearance in the league as a left winger in the game Sachsenring - 1. FC Magdeburg (1-0) on March 29, 1980. It was his 123rd league game for Sachsenring Zwickau, he had scored a total of 14 goals in six seasons.

Bismuth Gera

At the beginning of the 1980/81 soccer season, Braun switched to the GDR league club Wismut Gera in exchange with the young talent Ralf Gottschalk . There he was nominated as a midfielder as in Zwickau. Braun played in the Wismut league team until he was 33 years old. During the 1983/84 season he finally said goodbye to competitive football.

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 .
• Uwe Nuttelmann (Ed.): GDR Oberliga. 1962-1991. Self-published, Jade 2007, ISBN 978-3-930814-33-6 .