BELFORT
The team from the
fourth-tier of French
football knocked
high-flying Montpellier
out of the Coupe de
France in a penalty
shoot-out.SOUTH KOREA
UNDER-23S
Scored injury-time
winners in games
against China, Jordan
and Saudi Arabia to
win the AFC Under-
Championship and
confirm their place
in the Men’s Olympic
Games Football
Tournament later
this year in Tokyo.EU players will dry up. Also, from next
year English clubs will not be able to
sign foreign players that are aged 16
and 17 as FIFA rules stipulate they
must be 18.
The strongest card held by club
owners is the knowledge, shared by
the government and the FA, that the
Premier League is one of the country’s
most popular worldwide exports.
It does not compare in value to the
military, finance or gambling industries,
but it is one of the UK’s best-known
international brands. Self-protection
is in everyone’s interests; more so now
than ever. Which is bad news for the
vultures across the English Channel.
Indeed, not only may the Premier
League maintain its primacy, it could
become even richer if the easing of
investment controls make it easier
for Arab, Chinese and American
operators to throw ever more zillions
of pounds and dollars at the English
game...and pay ever more astronomical
transfer fees and wages.LIVERPOOL
The European
champions’ 2-0 win
at West Ham United
meant Jurgen Klopp’s
side had beaten
every top-flight
opponent in a campaign
for the first time.BRENDAN
RODGERS
The Leicester
City manager had
won 31 domestic
cup ties on the
trot going into
the semi-finals
of the League Cup
but saw his team
succumb to a late
winner from Aston
Villa’s Trezeguet.ATLETICO
MADRID
Diego Simeone’s
team were knocked
out of the Copa del
Rey by third-tier
Segunda B club
Cultural Leonesa.TORINO
The Turin
club suffered
their heaviest
home defeat
in a 7-0 loss to
Atalanta. It was
also Atalanta’s
biggest victory
in Serie A.GLOBAL FOOTBALL INTELLIGENCE
When Real Madrid beat
Eintracht Frankfurt 7-3 in
the 1960 European Cup
Final, the German club’s
president was Rudolf
Gramlich. He had played
for the club in the 1930s
and been capped 22
times by the national side.
What went unreported
was the fact that he had
been an active member
of the Nazi party and the
notorious SS. A full admission had to wait
until January this year, on the eve of the
75th anniversary of the liberation of the
Auschwitz death camp.
Frankfurt’s current supremo, Peter
Fischer, set out Gramlich’s grisly past
as the club stripped him, posthumously,
of the title of honorary president.
But how many more Gramlichs were
rehabilitated through their post-war
efforts to construct a newly democratised
West Germany from Hitler’s wreckage?
No one knows and, for a long time, no
one cared to look. It was too awkward,
too painful.
When the DFB published a centenary
history in 2000 which glossed over
the 1930s, the outcry prompted it to
commission a study by university lecturer
Nils Havermann, whose Fussball underm
Hakenkreuz (Football Under the Swastika)
was the first of a series of studies delving
deeper and deeper into the mire.
Havermann’s work did not escape
criticism for telling the “who, what and
when” of Nazi infiltration and control but
not the “why”; the reasoning and morality,
or lack of it.
During the Nazi
era, a policeman, Felix
Linnemann was president
of the DFB, from 1925
until 1945. According now
to the DFB: “[Linnemann]
as head of the Hanover
Criminal Police Control
Centre, was directly
involved in the rounding
up of Sinti and Roma,
which was the preliminary
stage for their deportation to Auschwitz.
“Several hundred people, due to an
instruction signed by Linnemann, were
deported to the extermination camp and
killed there.”
A leading referee in the inter-war
years, Peter “Peco” Bauwens was second
in significance after Linemann. He joined
the Nazi Party in 1933 but was later
expelled because his wife was Jewish.
Bauwens tried to engineer a German
takeover of FIFA. He was a friend of its
German general-secretary, Ivo Schricker,
but their relationship cooled after
Schricker rebuffed Bauwens’ proposals
to increase Germany’s places on the
executive committee and in voting power.
After the war Bauwens became
president of the recreated DFB and
survived controversy over what was
labelled a “Sieg Heil speech” at a dinner
to celebrate the 1954 World Cup victory.
He retired in 1960 and that may have
been the point at which German football
decided to draw a line under the past.
That line may have held but it could
not hold for ever.Breaking through the dark
clouds of history
Nazi...Rudolf
Gramlich