Monday, August 09, 2021
Li-Bu-Da, Part 6
On the 6th of June 1971, at his 50th birthday party, the president of relegated Bundesliga club Kickers Offenbach played his guests a reel-to-reel tape recording of certain phone calls. Bundestrainer Helmut Schoen, one of the guests present, left the party in abject shock. The ripples caused by this revelation of bribery and match-fixing in the Bundesliga were considerable; dozens of players and officials received bans of considerable length. One of them was the Schalke 04 captain, Reinhard "Stan" Libuda.
Late in the 1970/71 season, Schalke had lost a match at home to Arminia Bielefeld, one of the teams involved in the relegation struggle. It was later determined that the match had been thrown, and that the Schalke players had received a bribe of over 2,000 Deutschmarks each. They protested their innocence, but the subsequent investigation left little room for doubt. Libuda, as club captain, was banned for life, his international career was over, and his reputation and form were never to recover.
Ironically, in 1971/72, with the scandal making its painful way through the court of the German federation, Schalke were having their best season ever. With the young forward Klaus Fischer starring up front and the mighty Rolf Russmann spearheading the defence, Libuda and his men finished in second place in the league behind Bayern Munich, and won the German Cup in some style. After overcoming Köln in an incredible semi-final, decided on penalties after Schalke had overturned a three-goal first leg deficit, they romped to a 5-0 win over Kaiserslautern in the final.
By that stage, most of the players knew that this would be their last game for the Gelsenkirchen club for some time, and they were determined to give the fans a send-off to remember. Libuda's parting gift to his adoring home crowd was a trademark storming run down the right, to set up the fourth goal for Fischer.
Proudly displaying the cup to the Schalke faithful amidst the familiar shouts - LI-BU-DA! LI-BU-DA! - the Mexico 1970 star was asked by an interviewer how he felt about leaving his boyhood club. "To be honest, a little bit sad," was the understated reply. But his feelings on winning the club's first major trophy? "Overwhelming."
Along with his clubmate, the Dutch midfielder Heinz van Haaren, Libuda had secured a move to France, with Racing Strasbourg. Serving out his penance there while his ban was reduced to two years (cynics claimed that many of the bans were reduced with the 1974 World Cup in mind), he returned to Schalke in 1974, but there was to be no grand resurrection: failing to secure a regular place in the team, Libuda retired in 1976, aged 32.
Taciturn and eternally camera-shy, he had no inclination to begin the journey into coaching. But football had been his life since an early age, and the outside world proved difficult for Libuda to negotiate. He ran a tobacconist's shop for a while, but the world of business did not suit him; as his Mexico 1970 room-mate Jurgen Grabowski noted, he was never inclined to be tactful. Unemployment followed, as did divorce, alcohol, and a battle with cancer. In desperate financial trouble, he even had to sell his bronze medal from 1970; touchingly, it found its way into the hands of a Uruguayan collector, who remembered the man who had patrolled the right flank against his countrymen in that third-place playoff.
A Schalke fan eventually found Libuda a job at a paper-refining firm, but in 1992 complications from his laryngeal cancer put an end to his working life. In 1996, at the age of 52, Reinhard Libuda died from a stroke in his son Matthias's apartment in Gelsenkirchen.
On the day of his funeral, it pelted with rain. There is a German football expression "to leave (someone) wet", which roughly matches the English football term "to skin". It was something Libuda did regularly, and one of the mourners was heard to quip, "Look, Stan's left everyone wet again!"
Ultimately, despite his nickname, Libuda was to be no Stanley Matthews. The game had changed too much for a player to build an entire career on a drop of the shoulder and a burst of pace. But in Mexico, he had shown glimpses of a more complete player, a modern winger who might have starred alongside the likes of Muller, Beckenbauer and Netzer in the years ahead. It was not to be.
Perhaps the most commonly-told tale about Libuda is a probably apocryphal one: a prominent German church organisation had adopted as its watchword "No-one gets past God!", and the motto was displayed on posters outside churches throughout the country. In Gelsenkirchen, a Schalke fan apparently added a graffito underneath: "...except Stan Libuda", imagining the Almighty as a hapless left-back on a joyful afternoon at the Glückauf-Kampfbahn...or perhaps as Boris Gaganelov, Bulgaria's left-back on that triumphant day in Leon in 1970.
