Otmar Sommerfeld

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Otmar Sommerfeld (born November 16, 1929 , † July 26, 2008 in Hamburg-Harburg ) was a German football player . With a total of 362 appearances between 1949 and 1963, he is the record player in what was then the first-class football league north .

Career

In the 1949/50 season, Sommerfeld played 25 point games for the Harburger Turnerbund as a striker and scored four goals. Although Harburg had to relegate to the Hamburg amateur league as far behind at the end of the season, he stayed with the club for which he had laced his football boots since the end of the war .

In 1951, the angular, tall, 20-year-old then followed his coach Walter Risse to the north bank of the Elbe , where he competed for FC St. Pauli , which was already on the Heiligengeistfeld at that time , but not in the Millerntor Stadium, which was inaugurated in 1963 played. At St. Pauli, a change was underway because a number of players in the post-war “wonder team” (including Hans Appel , Karl Miller and Heinz Hempel ) were already approaching 40. Risse retrained the young attacker, who from then on found his place as an outside or middle runner at the side of St. Pauli legend Harald Stender . Between 1951 and 1959 Sommerfeld completed 227 league matches - so he had only missed 13 games - and scored 13 goals for the brown-whites. It was not enough for him to win a Northern Championship in those years - with one exception, the title was always won by local rivals HSV . But in 1954 St. Pauli finished the season in second place behind Hannover 96  - and Sommerfeld was deprived of participation in the final round of the German championship because of the World Cup in Switzerland , because, for once, only the top leagues qualified for it.

On the pitch, his duels with the opposing center forwards, in particular with HSVer Uwe Seeler and Altonaer Werner Erb , became a legend, for whom the factual and serene defensive line often made life difficult. In 1954 this led to an invitation from the national coach to a screening course, which, however, did not allow Sepp Herberger to be appointed to the A or B national team . For this he was twice in the North German (NFV) selection. An offer from Werder Bremen personally rejected St. Pauli's President Wilhelm Koch, who brokered the lease of a gas station in the Hamburg district of Rothenburgsort for his player to compensate . And Sommerfeld felt at home in the Kiez anyway, especially since he was popular with the spectators of the numerous dock workers at the time. He himself said about it: “People who were there with all their hearts - many of them worked until 1pm on the weekend and then went straight to the stadium. They sometimes had banana trees with them for the players that they had dusted off somewhere in the harbor. "

It was not until 1959 that Otmar Sommerfeld left FC St. Pauli and played at ASV Bergedorf 85 until 1965 , where he also made 110 league games with three goals in four years. With the “magpies”, however, it was mostly about avoiding the descent; Sommerfeld made an active contribution to ensuring that this succeeded until 1963. In the following two years in the new Regionalliga Nord he was much shorter in terms of sport, but with his routine he was still his man in nine second division matches before he said goodbye to competitive sport after 16 years. Looking back, Otmar Sommerfeld rates this phase of life positively: “An incredibly good time. We had guys, real originals. ” At the age of 78 he died in his southern Elbe homeland.

literature

  • Bernd Jankowski, Harald Pistorius, Jens Reimer Prüß : Football in the North. 100 years of the North German Football Association. History, chronicle, names, dates, facts, figures. AGON Sportverlag, Kassel 2005, ISBN 3-89784-270-X .
  • Lorenz Knieriem, Hardy Grüne : Player Lexicon 1890 - 1963 . In: Encyclopedia of German League Football . tape 8 . AGON, Kassel 2006, ISBN 3-89784-148-7 .
  • René Martens: Miracles always happen. The history of FC St. Pauli. The workshop, Göttingen 2002, ISBN 3-89533-375-1
  • Andreas Meyer, Volker Stahl, Uwe Wetzner: Football Lexicon Hamburg . Die Werkstatt , Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-89533-477-1 (396 pages).
  • Jens Reimer Prüß (Ed.): Bung bottle with flat pass cork. The history of the Oberliga Nord 1947–1963. Klartext, Essen 1991, ISBN 3-88474-463-1 .

credentials

  1. ↑ Martens, pp. 65-68
  2. ↑ Jankowski / Pistorius / Prüß, p. 372
  3. ↑ Meyer / Stahl / Wetzner, p. 280
  4. ↑ Martens, p. 259
  5. ↑ Hardy Green, Lorenz Knieriem: Encyclopedia of German League Football. Volume 8: Player Lexicon 1890–1963. P. 370; the 1958 statement in Meyer / Stahl / Wetzner, p. 280, is incorrect because Sommerfeld would then not have been able to play 227 top division games for St. Pauli
  6. ↑ Jankowski / Pistorius / Prüß, p. 237
  7. ↑ Übersteiger No. 89 of August 31, 2008, p. 15
personal data
SURNAME Sommerfeld, Otmar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German soccer player
DATE OF BIRTH November 16, 1929
DATE OF DEATH July 26, 2008
Place of death Hamburg