Fritz WALTER
 Germany WALTER Fritz 31/10/1920 (dead on 17/6/2002) | Position: forward (attacking midfielder) HONOURS FIFA World Cup (1954) CLUBS 1937-1959 FC Kaiserslautern (Germany) |
Profile
Fritz Walter was born in Kaiserslautern on October 31st, 1920. He started playing football when he was 8 at the youth academy of the club where he would play all his life. He started playing with the first team at the age of 17 as a forward, but then the great German player became a legend as a midfielder. With FC Kaiserslautern he won the first two league titles in the club’s history and stayed there for 22 years. Actually, FC Kaiserslautern had to wait for almost 40 years before gaining a Bundesliga title again (1991).
His career was interrupted by the World War II (1939-1945) during which he joined the army and was taken prisoner on the Eastern front. During his imprisonment in a camp placed at the border between Russia and Romania after seeing him playing in the matches between prisoners and guards, the latter talked to their superiors in order to have him play with their team against another Russian team. On that occasion he won the admiration of the general who was in charge of the camp and who helped Walter to return to Kaiserslautern asserting that “Fritz comes from Kaiserslautern, and that is in the French-occupied zone, so he is French and can go home”.
On his return to Kaiserslautern he made an extraordinary work in order to make his team go beyond the problems caused by the war. Friedrich worked very hard as a player, as a coach and as a manager as he wanted to make the German club as great as it was before. In 1940 he made his debut with the German selection scoring a “hat-trick”. Very soon he became the real brain of the German team. “Friedrich” turned into the right hand of the coach Sepp Herberger on the pitch.
After his forced break because of the war he started playing again with the German selection in 1951 and at the World Championship in Switzerland in 1954, in spite of his age (34), he led masterfully the West German selection to the final, which they won by 3 to 2 against the feared Hungarian selection of Puskás, Kocsis and all the other Hungarian champions. At 1958 World Cup (when he was 38) he captained again the German selection, but they were beaten in the semi-finals by Sweden, and Fritz got injured during that match.
Even though previously he had said twice that he would have retired, he actually did it in 1959 when he was 39. In 1985 the FC Kaiserslautern’s stadium was named Fritz Walter Stadion in his honour. He worked very successfully in favour of the Sepp Herberger Foundation, visiting young people in prison until he died in June 2002 at the age of 81. He played 61 matches with the national selection and scored 33 goals. During his footballing career he got to score 306 goals in 379 official matches, which is something really impressive if we think that he was forced to a long break during World War II.
