Helmut Schön

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Helmut Schön (* 15). September 1915 in Dresden † February 23, 1996 in Wiesbaden was a German football player and the most successful national coach to date.

As a player of the Dresdner SC Schön won in the rounds 1942/43 and 1943/44 twice the German Football Championship and in the years 1940 and 1941 twice the Tschammer Cup. Between 1937 and 1941, Sepp Herberger appointed him to 16 international matches, in which Schön scored 17 goals, to the national football team. As a player coach, he seamlessly made the transition to the coaching office. Schön was both coach of the selection of the Soviet zone, the forerunner of the national football team of the GDR, as well as national coach of the Saarland national football team and national coach of the German national football team. He became one of the most successful national coaches in the world from 1964 to 1978. At his first world championship tournament as national coach in England in 1966, he reached the final with the German national team; At the 1970 World Cup in Mexico he was third with the team. He won the European Championship in 1972, the World Championship in Germany in 1974 and became Vice European Champion in Yugoslavia in 1976. The fact that Schön as national coach gave the national players a lot of freedom and voice instead of giving them rigid tactical measures, many sports journalists see as his outstanding performance, but was also often interpreted as a leadership weakness, especially at the end of his coaching career.

In the standard work on the history of the national football team, authors Dietrich Schulze-Marmeling and Hubert Dahlkamp classify the eight years of his tenure from 1966 to 1974 as “the most playful, eventful and successful phase in the history of the German national team”.

Player career

Youth, 1920 to 1933
At the age of five or six, Helmut Schön began playing football on the streets of the Dresdner Seevorstadt. He credits this period of “pavement and asphalt football” with the training of his special talents, ball feeling and fast reflexes. His father, the art dealer Anton Schön, did not share his third-born soccer passion. Helmut Schön had a sister twelve years older and a brother eight years older.

At the age of ten he joined the boys' team of SV Dresdensia in 1925. At the age of fifteen, Schön, whose footballing role model Matthias Sindelar was, played for the first time in the first team at a friendly match in Bautzen. Immediately afterwards he moved from the small Dresdensia to the great Dresdner SC, where the national striker Richard Hofmann became his idol. The young talent Helmut Schön benefited from the "Football Development Assistance on the Continent" of the Englishman Jimmy Hogan, who from 1928 to the coaching office at the DSC. In particular, the technical training, the combination game, the art of “overreach”