Tuesday, October 03, 2023
The Hero Who Defected, Part 1
It was football's ultimate Cold War encounter. West Germany versus East Germany, at the 1974 World Cup. Some 150 miles northwest of the Berlin Wall, the communist and capitalist Germanies spent 90 minutes slugging it out in the quintessential match-as-metaphor. And despite home advantage and the presence of such luminaries as Franz Beckenbauer, Gerd Muller and Sepp Maier in the West German side, it was the Easterners who triumphed, thanks to a well-taken goal by the Magdeburg star Jürgen Sparwasser.
The rest of the tournament saw Beckenbauer and co. pulling themselves up by their bootstraps to return to form and ultimately claim the title, while East Germany went out with a whimper in the second stage. But no matter: the point had been made, the bragging rights were gained. And Sparwasser quickly became an idol in the communist "half" of the divided country.
But thirteen years later, there was a wry twist to the tale, one which attracted little notice outside of the two Germanies. Jürgen Sparwasser, the hero of Hamburg, defected to the West.
The reasons why he did so were complex, and indicative of the manifold ways in which sport became tangled up with politics behind the Iron Curtain.
Born in 1948 in the small industrial town of Halberstadt, Sparwasser began his career at the local club under the watchful eye of the coach, who also happened to be his father. His talent was quickly recognised, and he was recruited to the region's most prestigious club, Magdeburg, where he would stay for the next sixteen years.
At international level, his career began with a bang: scoring in his first youth international, against Bulgaria, he also played a key role in the East German youth team's surprise victory in the 1965 UEFA youth championship in West Germany, scoring two goals in the final against England. Along the way, the Easterners also thrashed a Netherlands side which included a teenage Johan Cruyff. (In a curious foretaste of the future, West Germany beat the Dutch 2-1 at the event, with a young Berti Vogts marking Cruyff...)
Eventually Sparwasser became a part of the senior national team as well, and won a bronze medal with the East Germans at the 1972 Olympics - again, an event held in West Germany - scoring five goals along the way. This success was followed by a first-ever World Cup qualification in 1974, with a prolific new striker, Hansa Rostock's Joachim Streich, forming a dangerous partnership with Sparwasser.
At club level, he remained with Magdeburg despite relegation in the late sixties, helped to bring them back up to the Oberliga, and became part of the core group of players who were to make the club a force not only at home but in Europe in the seventies.
Magdeburg, and Sparwasser, came to wider notice when they pulled off a considerable shock by beating AC Milan in the final of the 1974 Cup-Winners Cup. That match, and more, in Part 2.
