Peter Meyer (soccer player, 1940)

Photo taken in 1967

Peter Meyer (born February 18, 1940 in Düsseldorf ) is a former German soccer player who was part of the senior national team in 1967 .

Career

societies

Fortuna Dusseldorf

The young center forward came to Fortuna Düsseldorf in 1960 via SpVgg Wersten 04 and TuRU Düsseldorf . At first he played with the amateurs. From the round 1961/62 he became a contract player with Fortuna in the Oberliga West , in which the Fortuna 1960/61 was again successful. He made his first league appearance on the third day of the match in a 2-1 win at Alemannia Aachen . A week later he scored his first two goals against national team stopper Leo Wilden in a 4-1 home win against 1. FC Köln . From 1961 to 1963 he played 47 times in the Oberliga West and scored 32 goals for the Düsseldorf team. In 1962 he reached the DFB Cup final with Fortuna, where they lost 1: 2 nV against 1. FC Nürnberg .

Since the Rhinelander had not been accepted into the new Bundesliga 1963/64, three rounds followed in the Regionalliga West for the dangerous striker . Here he brought it to 93 games with 72 goals. In the promotion round to the Bundesliga in 1966 Fortuna Düsseldorf prevailed against FK Pirmasens , Hertha BSC and the Offenbacher Kickers . In the six games, "Pitter" Meyer contributed four goals. The league in the 1966/67 round did not succeed the Fortunes in the Bundesliga. The center forward, dubbed “Brother Leichtfuß”, played 25 games in this round and scored eight goals. The coach of Borussia Mönchengladbach , Hennes Weisweiler , noticed his goal danger and assertiveness so persistently that he was able to move to the Bökelberg in the summer of 1967.

Borussia Monchengladbach

In six months, Peter Meyer experienced the glamor and misery of a football star at Borussia Mönchengladbach in the 1967/68 season . He opened his Bundesliga presence with the "foals" from the Lower Rhine on the 1st match day in a 4: 3 away win on August 19, 1967 at FC Schalke 04 with three goals. After his two goals for a 5-2 win at 1. FC Köln, he already had 19 goals on his account after the 15th matchday. He was the undisputed leader of the top scorer list and also a candidate for the national team. The combination game of the Weisweiler team, which culminated in lightning-fast counterattacks, was very accommodating to the "ripper type" Peter Meyer. The Gladbach “hurray game” benefited as much from the qualities of the new center forward as he did from the attacking mentality of the Bökelberg troop.

On January 9, 1968, "Pitter" Meyer suffered a broken tibia and fibula while training at the Duisburg-Wedau sports school and was therefore stopped for the time being. When another operation became necessary during convalescence, fears arose that the patient would be out for a longer period of time. It got even worse: Meyer remained unused in the second half of the 1967/68 season and was unable to play a game for Mönchengladbach in the following 1968/69 season . On the 2nd match day of the 1969/70 season , on August 23, 1969, he played the first 45 minutes in a 2-1 home win against FC Bayern Munich and was then replaced because of pain at the break point. That was his departure from the Bundesliga. Because of the injuries caused by the training accident on January 9, 1968, he could no longer play in the Bundesliga. Due to the mentioned half-time assignment, he belongs to the championship team of 1970.

National team

The head of the Bundesliga scorer list Peter Meyer was nominated by national coach Helmut Schön for the decisive game on December 17, 1967 in Tirana against Albania in the European Championship qualification . Gerd Müller was in a bad form and the veteran Franz Brungs from the league leaders 1. FC Nürnberg was out of the question for the national team. Sigfried Held and Hannes Löhr were supposed to use the wings to transport the balls from the midfield of Günter Netzer , Hans Küppers and Wolfgang Overath into the middle of the storm to the current Bundesliga hunter. There they should then be recycled. So the mind games before the game. After the goalless 0-0 draw, Germany failed to qualify for the European Football Championship in 1968 . The game in Albania went down in the annals as the disgrace of Tirana .

Due to his injury on January 9, 1968 and its consequences, Peter Meyer could no longer demonstrate his international class.

Success as a player

Germany

• German champion: 1970

Others

Peter Meyer, who had already built up a repair shop in the automotive industry in Düsseldorf, let his career come to an end at VfL Benrath in the Niederrhein Association League.

He shares a Bundesliga record with Robert Lewandowski . Both are the only players who managed to score 9 goals in the first 5 match days of a Bundesliga season.

Web links

• Peter Meyer in the database of weltfussball.de
• Peter Meyer in the database of fussballdaten.de
• Peter Meyer in the database of National-Football-Teams.com (English)

literature

• Matthias Weinrich: Encyclopedia of German League Football. Volume 3: 35 years of the Bundesliga. Part 1. The founding years 1963–1975. Stories, pictures, constellations, tables. AGON Sportverlag, Kassel 1998, ISBN 3-89784-132-0 .
• Harald Landefeld, Achim Nöllenheidt (ed.): Helmut, tell me dat Tor ... New stories and portraits from the Oberliga West 1947–1963. Klartext, Essen 1993, ISBN 3-88474-043-1 .
• Ulrich Homann (Hrsg.): Hellfire on Ascension. The history of the promotion rounds to the Bundesliga 1963–1974. Klartext, Essen 1990, ISBN 3-88474-346-5 .
• Christian Karn, Reinhard Rehberg: Encyclopedia of German League Football. Volume 9: Player Lexicon 1963-1994. Bundesliga, regional league, 2nd league. AGON Sportverlag, Kassel 2012, ISBN 978-3-89784-214-4 , p. 338.
• Jürgen Bitter : Germany's national soccer player: the lexicon . SVB Sportverlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-328-00749-0 , p. 314 f .