44 years ago: GDR manages to win group against FRG
On 22 June 1974, the professional football teams from East and West Germany met for the only time, and that at the World Cup in West Germany. The two teams had already met two years earlier at the Olympics, but the FRG had fielded an amateur team. The group match between the two in Hamburg actually only decided who would win the group, as both participants had already qualified for the next round, and yet it was later to go down in history. The clear objective of Georg Buschner, coach of the GDR eleven, was to have his own team compete against the best teams in the world and to measure itself against the top footballers, which, however, contradicted the line of GDR officials who considered victories at the Olympics to be more important. No one had expected the GDR to show such self-confidence and in the 77th minute the time had come: the winning goal for the GDR was scored, leaving the big favourites, the FRG, stunned. To this day, the West German coach Helmut Schön is said to have told his team that they had to lose in order to be able to play weaker opponents in the next round, instead of Brazil and the Netherlands. However, these are mere allegations. In the end, the defeat in the German-German match caused enough resentment among Franz Beckenbauer’s team that they played their way through the next round with extra motivation, winning the final against the Netherlands 2-1 at the end of the World Cup and thus becoming world champions.
Do you remember who scored the winning goal for the GDR? All visitors who give the right name at our ticket office pay only €7.50* for their ticket until 15.07.2018!
A little tip: The goal scorer himself once said that if one day only “Hamburg 1974” was written on his gravestone, everyone would know who was buried there.
*Reduced admission (students/pupils/trainees/pensioners/disabled people) 4.00 € with the correct answer.
