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When Matthias Herget, flanked by Horst Feilzer and Norbert Brinkmann, lifted der Pott on a sun-dappled evening at Berlin’s Olympic stadium four decades ago, a unique moment passed in the stolid world of German football. A cup shock, the kind of wonderful giant-killing that is fairly routine in the English game but barely translates elsewhere.
Looking back now, it remains a seismic inverting of the natural order in a nation more used to an honour roll dominated by a handful of major clubs. Bayer 05 Uerdingen had just beaten the holders Bayern Munich 2-1 to win the 1985 German Cup final. As Goethe wrote: “Nothing is worth more than this day.”
Incredibly, Uerdingen wrenched the big bronze-and-gemstone trophy from the southern aristos’ grasp at the Olympiastadion in (then) West Berlin, before German reunification. It was the first time the DFB-Pokal final has been staged in the former German capital, and the script did not go to plan.
Since 1953, the climax of the competition had been a moveable feast, staged all over West Germany in neutral venues – from Düsseldorf, to Kassel, to Stuttgart, to Hannover and places in between – but that year, at long last, the grand old stadium that staged the 1936 Olympic Games had been spruced up and once more held 72,000 spectators, with the rest of the nation tuning in.
The magnitude of Uerdingen’s upset must be gauged against the supremacy of Bayern Munich. By 1985 the Bavarians had won the German Cup seven times since its first iteration in 1953, as well as the European Cup hat-trick of 1974, 1975 and 1976 that placed them among the first rank of the continent’s football powerhouses. This season they are again in the final and will face Stuttgart on Sunday evening.
By contrast Uerdingen are the club of Krefeld, an unassuming German city of around 300,000 souls on the north Rhine, a place perennially eclipsed by its showy neighbour Düsseldorf. They were a modest club who had hitherto won little of note but with the backing of the German chemicals giant Bayer AG, Uerdingen – along with their near neighbours at fellow works-backed Bayer 04 Leverkusen – were prospering.
Under the canny leadership of head coach Kalli Feldkamp and the club’s ambitious chairman Arno Eschler, Uerdingen – who had only been promoted to the Bundesliga a couple of years earlier – were unheralded, the underdogs who were never expected to bite. And that despite taking Bayern to a replay in their previous DFB-Pokal meeting in 1984. Bayern would go on to beat Borussia Mönchengladbach on penalties in the 1984 final.
The team in white that afternoon, 26 May 1985, were devoid of household names. Horst Feilzer and Wolfgang Schäfer were the goalscorers. Playmaking in midfield were the Funkel brothers, Friedhelm and Wolfgang. Udo Lattek’s celebrated Bayern, meanwhile, had Dieter Hoeness – who scored Bayern’s only goal – a young Lothar Matthäus and Klaus Augenthaler in their ranks.
Bayern grab an early lead in the eighth minute through Hoeness. But Uerdingen come back in a flash, equalising a minute later through Feilzer. The winner arrives in the second half, as Schäfer scores the decisive goal in the 66th minute and, implausibly, Uerdingen hold on for a historic victory.
There is delirium among fans of the Blue and Reds, a parade of sorts along the Ku’damm back to team hotel, where even the normally reserved Berliners flock on to pavements to cheer the winners. The players’ wives greet them with more bottles of champagne. Celebrations at the bar on the 14th floor of the Hotel Intercontinental rage late into night. There is a banquet and speeches. Bleary eyed the following morning, chairman Eschler muses: “Ich hoffe dass dies keine einmmailie [I hope this is not a one-off].”
There was indeed more to follow for Uerdingen. They blazed a trail to the European Cup-Winners’ Cup semi-final in 1986. Their tumultuous quarter-final against East Germany’s Dynamo Dresden became embedded in the club’s lore as the “Miracle of the Grotenburg” after an improbable second-leg comeback at their home ground. That tie was watched by 18m television viewers, the German broadcaster ZDF airing that match instead of Bayern’s game against Anderlecht in the European Cup. They finished third in the Bundesliga in the season after their cup win.
But their Icarus moment passed soon enough and the club’s fortunes declined when Bayer AG withdrew financial support in 1995, opting instead to invest their football budget in Leverkusen alone. They were renamed KFC Uerdingen but tumbled down the German leagues, endured insolvencies along the way and now play in the fifth-tier Oberliga.
KFC remain a proud and well-supported side. Last November, they celebrated the club’s 120th anniversary. Their open concrete bowl of a stadium, the Grotenburg, stands adjacent to Krefeld Zoo. On match days, fans down alt beer and consume hot currywurst to the background noise of elephants and big cats, after they have picked their way past the emptying stalls of the morning’s regular Trödelmarkt flea market.
There is progress on the pitch, too. Under the coach Julian Stöhr, Krefeld were finishing the season strongly, pressing for promotion, until a 6-1 drubbing by Schonnebeck dented their prospects. After a lively 1-1 draw against Kleve, they sit third in the Oberliga Niederrhein table with two matches remaining.
Insolvency proceedings against the club were lifted at the end of April, to their understandable relief, and marks “a crucial milestone for our club,” according to the chairman, Norbert Philipp, who took over in March. He understands only too well the club has has struggled to find backers, but remains optimistic about the future, telling the Westdeutsche Zeitung: “There’s a lot of bad blood in the past, and yet we’ve still managed to attract more than 60 sponsors. The club’s appeal is so strong that there are still people who support it.”
Football is littered with the tales of clubs that have flared brilliantly but all too briefly. In Krefeld they know this only too well. They are beginning to understand the cruel footballing fates in Leicester, too.
The English city boasted the Premier League champions a decade ago, but Leicester City have sunk into League One after a calamitous season in the Championship. Coincidentally, Leicester have since 1969 been twinned with the small city on the Rhine that once celebrated Bayer Uerdingen’s monumental giant-killing.
