Wolfgang stops

Wolfgang Stops (born July 12, 1925 ) was a football player in Halle (Saale) . With the BSG Turbine Halle he became East German soccer champion in 1952.

Athletic career

Stops was one of the first football players in Halle after the Second World War. In 1946, the 21-year-old joined the Giebichenstein sports club, which succeeded the disbanded VfL Halle 96 . With the SG, Stops could only contest the narrowly limited regional competitions permitted by the Soviet occupation forces, which were limited to the urban district of Halle. The SG, and later also its successor ZSG Genossenschaften Halle, could not qualify for the later nationally approved championships. After a short interlude at the company sports association (BSG) Stahl Halle, which is also insignificant in football, Stops joined the league club BSG Turbine Halle in 1951 .

Stops' first league season 1951/52 was mixed, as one of the title contenders Turbine only came in sixth. With an almost unchanged line-up, the Halle residents were able to live up to their role as favorites in the 1951/52 season and were sovereign GDR champions. The fact that they scored the most goals of all 19 teams involved was largely thanks to their angular center forward Stops. Although he had only played 29 of the 36 played point games, he scored almost a third of Halle's goals with 24 goals. This also put him in fourth place on the Oberliga top scorer list. Completely inexplicably, the Turbine team slipped to 13th place in the 1952/53 season, fighting for a long time against relegation. Even with stops it didn't go as usual, he couldn't even place himself among the top ten top scorers. After the suppressed popular uprising of June 17, 1953 , Stops was one of the few regular players who did not migrate to West Germany. With the newly formed team, he made sure that in the 1953/54 season with eighth place in the league was safely managed.

When the turbine team was forced to join the newly founded SC Chemie Halle-Leuna in autumn 1954 , Stops refused. The 29-year-old stayed with BSG Turbine, which had to play with its previous 2nd team in the third-class, later fourth-class Halle district league . Since Stops did not return to the GDR Oberliga even later, he only had 82 league games with 37 goals.

literature

• Hanns Leske : Encyclopedia of GDR football . Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-89533-556-3 , p. 476.
• Andreas Baingo, Michael Horn: The History of the GDR Oberliga. Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2003, ISBN 3-89533-428-6 , p. 320.

Web links

• Wolfgang stops in the database of the German Football Association