Icon died unexpectedly: Werder Bremen mourns record player Burdenski

Icon died unexpectedly
Werder Bremen mourns the loss of record player Burdenski

Dieter Burdenski guards the Werder goal almost 600 times. He was on the pitch for the Green-Whites more often than anyone else. He also had a place in the German national soccer team. Now Bremen’s honorary captain has died unexpectedly.

Bundesliga soccer team Werder Bremen mourns the loss of its record player Dieter Burdenski. The 73-year-old died unexpectedly this Wednesday, the club announced. The Green-Whites’ long-time goalkeeper watched the game against SC Freiburg in the stadium at the weekend. In more than two decades he played between the posts in 582 games for Bremen. His greatest successes included winning the 1988 championship as a player and the double at the end of the 2003/04 season as part of the coaching team.

“The news of his death shocks us and makes us deeply sad,” the president and chairman of the supervisory board of SV Werder, Hubertus Hess-Grunewald, is quoted on the club’s website. “Budde” shaped the team for two decades and is “undoubtedly one of the greatest Werder players of all time.” Everyone at the club greatly appreciated his “reliability, his positive attitude to life, his passion for Werder, but also his critical spirit,” he continued.

Burdenski, who was born in Bremen in 1950, was in goal from 1972 to 1988. During this time he played 444 Bundesliga games. There are also games for Arminia Bielefeld and FC Schalke 04. He also wore the DFB jersey twelve times. He celebrated his international debut in 1977 in Montevideo with a 2-0 win against Uruguay. In 1978 he was part of the national team at the World Cup in Argentina.

He remained loyal to the club even when it was relegated to the second division in 1980 – and was part of the team in the golden years that followed under the coaching icon Otto Rehhagel. After the end of his active career, he worked as a goalkeeping coach in the club, organized, among other things, training camps for the team and looked after the traditional team. He is one of the club’s ten honorary captains.

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