Wilfried Klingbiel

GDR junior
selection 1957 Klingbiel 4th from right

Wilfried Klingbiel (born June 21, 1939 in Stendal ) is a former soccer player in the GDR and played six times in the GDR national soccer team .

Between Lok Stendal and Stahl Brandenburg

Wilfried Klingbiel's football career began in the Altmark town of Stendal , where he played in a school team from 1948 that was affiliated with SG Stendal-Nord. The BSG Lok Stendal later developed from Stendal-Nord and was represented in the highest East German soccer league ( Oberliga ) from 1949 . Klingbiel officially became a member of the BSG Lok in 1952 and won the district championship with both the B and A youth teams. In the summer of 1956 he was appointed to the GDR youth national team for the first time. In 1957 he passed the Abitur and then began an apprenticeship as a locksmith at the Reichsbahnausbesserungswerk , the BSG's supporting company.

As a 17-year-old, he played his first league game on March 18, 1957, in the encounter at SC Einheit Dresden (2-4). The season in which Klingbiel established himself as a striker mostly on the left wing position did not go well for Lok, because in the end the team was relegated after nine years in the league. The immediate ascent succeeded, but also in 1959 the equally immediate descent.

After Klingbiel made his A international debut in the GDR - Poland encounter on June 29, 1958 , he did not want to continue playing in the second division as a national player, and so Klingbiel left Stendal and joined SC Dynamo Berlin , which the 1959 season as Had finished third division. He played his first league game for the Berlin team on matchday 1, March 20, 1960 in a 3-0 draw against Lok Leipzig . With Dynamo he experienced the GDR runner-up in 1960 and on June 10, 1962 the GDR Cup final against SC Chemie Halle , which the Halle team won 3-1.

At the beginning of the 1964/65 season, Klingbiel joined 1. FC Magdeburg , who had been urgently looking for a new striker after scoring 25 goals in 26 league league games of the previous season. Here, on May 8, 1965, he celebrated the greatest success of his footballing career in a 2-1 win against SC Motor Jena in the final of the GDR football cup. With his five goals in the quarter and semi-finals, Klingbiel played a key role in reaching the final. After his international career had ended several years ago, Klingbiel came back to international appearances for the FCM with seven games in the European Cup Winners' Cup in the 1965/66 season . In the quarter-finals they lost just short of West Ham United , who competed with the eventual world champions of 1966, Bobby Moore , Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters .

In the league games for 1. FCM Klingbiel did not score a single goal and at the end of the 1965/66 season he said goodbye to Eisenhüttenstadt , where he was now 27 years old when he was hired by the second-class BSG Stahl . There he finally had a sense of achievement after four years when his team was promoted to the league in 1969. At the age of 33, he no longer felt up to the demands of high-performance football, so he switched again, this time to the third-class district league for BSG Stahl Brandenburg . He also led this team to promotion to the second-rate GDR league in 1970 . He remained active for another four years, although he stopped playing football in 1973, but remained in football until 1975 as the coach of Stahl Brandenburg and later as head of the football training center.

Overview of player stations

1947-1959	Locomotive Stendal	37 league games, 4 goals
1960-1964	Dynamo Berlin	79 league games, 15 goals
1964-1966	1. FC Magdeburg	40 league games
1966-1969	Stahl Eisenhüttenstadt	GDR League
1969-1973	Steel Brandenburg	District League, GDR League

Selection player

As early as 1956, Klingbiel received his first appointment in international football, where he initially participated in the junior national team. Already in his first international junior match against Poland (1: 3) he drew attention to himself with the only GDR goal he scored. In 1957 he took part in the youth team at the FIFA International Junior Tournament in Spain. He played a total of seven international junior matches. Outgrown the junior age, he completed five more matches in the GDR youth team. As a player at Lok Stendal, he played twice in the B national team, and there were eight games in total.

Klingbiel played his first international match as a Lok Stendal player on June 29, 1958 in Rostock against Poland . At 1-1, he immediately scored his first international goal as a left winger. However, it stayed with this one goal, which is why his A international game record with a total of six appearances, four of which for Dynamo Berlin and one for Magdeburg, looks modest. His last game with the national team was the World Cup qualifier against Hungary on September 10, 1961 in Berlin, which ended in a 2-3 defeat. Klingbiel was used as a left winger in all of his international A matches.

Klingbiel made a brief guest appearance in the GDR's Olympic soccer team . On September 23, 1959, he also played as a left winger in the second leg in the domestic German qualification, which the GDR lost 2-1 to the West German amateurs and thus missed participation in the Olympics after the 2-0 defeat in the first leg.

International match overview

• 7 junior internationals
• 5 international youth games
• 8 international B matches
• 1 Olympic qualification game
• 6 international caps

Others

Wilfried Klingbiel holds a degree in mechanical engineering and has been employed in the Brandenburg steel and rolling mill since 1969. After reunification he changed his field of activity and went to Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe e. V., where he was a board member of the district associations in Brandenburg / Havel and Berlin until he was 65.

Web links

• All international A matches at www.dfb.de.