Walter Sanß

Walter Sanß (born May 30, 1879 , † 1946 ) was an association functionary in the pioneering days of football in Germany. From 1905 to 1909 he was secretary and from 1910 to 1914 the first managing director of the German Football Association .

The DFB board with Walter Sanß (2nd from left) in 1906

Walter Sanß 'house in Dortmund, which was the first branch of the DFB

As a football player, Walter Sanß was active for Dortmund FC 95 . He played a key role in its re-establishment in October 1899 and then took over its chairmanship. Sanß also worked early in the administration of the Rheinisch-Westfälischer Spiel-Verband , founded in 1898, and took part in the VII Bundestag of the German Football Association (DFB) on January 31, 1904 in Kassel, which the West Germans joined on this occasion . In May 1905 he was on the IX. Bundestag in Cologne elected as 1st secretary to the board of the DFB under Gottfried Hinze and confirmed in this office annually until 1909. In 1910, the DFB decided to set up an office because the administrative tasks had meanwhile grown significantly. In the year von Sanß joined the DFB board, the association had 254 clubs with around 13,000 players; five years later there were already 1,361 football clubs in 641 locations and almost 110,000 members. Walter Sanß was appointed as the first full-time managing director; his office was set up in his house at Gutenbergstrasse 43, Dortmund. In addition to administrative work, his field of responsibility also continued to include the publication of the annual DFB yearbooks, the first edition of which he had written in his role as secretary in 1905.

After the beginning of the First World War, Sanß was called up for military service, he did not take a position at the German Football Association after the war, whose office had already been moved to Kiel, the place of residence of his successor Georg Blaschke , in 1916 . In Dortmund, Sanß helped rebuild his club, for which he was also active as a player until 1921. From 1920 he was in the management of the West German Game Association, among other things as chairman for the football committee and as chairman of referees. He was also active as a referee, for example before the war he had led the international match between Belgium and Switzerland in Basel on May 4, 1913. After the end of his career as an active player, he directed numerous other games in the 1920s before he finally retired completely from football.

literature

• Entry Sanß, Walter. In: Jürgen Bitter : Germany's football. The encyclopedia. All names, all terms in more than 14,500 entries. With statistics and tables. Herbig, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-7766-2558-5 , p. 624.
• Carl Koppehel: History of the German Football Sport. DFB (Ed.), Frankfurt am Main 1959, p. 321f.
• TSC Eintracht Dortmund 1848/95 (ed.): 100 years on the ball in Dortmund ... the "95s". (Festschrift), Dortmund 2005, p. 21 ( online (PDF file; 481 kB))

Individual evidence

1. ↑ When Dortmund was still the headquarters of the DFB (derwesten.de)