Saturday 23 October 2021
Curious hunt for the “scalp”
When the Bundesliga still wore a toupee
It sounds like a story from 1001 nights. Exactly fifty years ago, a professional with a toupee played for the first time in a Bundesliga match. And that caused a stir – on and off the pitch. Because the optical transformation led to some curious scenes with prominent star cast.
It was October 2nd, 1971, when Horst Köppel suddenly looked so completely different. The FC Bayern Munich players rubbed their eyes in amazement. The “Horschtle” had something done in the jersey of her opponent, VfB Stuttgart. When the photographers gathered around Köppel to catch a picture of the young professional from Swabia, a light dawned on the people of Munich: Köppel had an artificial hairpiece on his head.
Where the 23-year-old had previously had a veritable bald head and the floodlights, now a lush hairstyle was blowing in the wind. But Köppel didn’t like the story at all. His conclusion after 90 minutes did not sound good: “If I had known how much work it was and how much you sweat underneath, then no …!”
Perhaps his discomfort was also due to the fact that the legendary Bayern goalkeeper, Sepp Maier, wanted to make fun of Köppel’s unusual situation. Again and again in the game he grabbed the Stuttgart man’s “scalp” – but he just couldn’t get hold of him with his gloves. In the months and years that followed, Köppel’s new headdress was always an occasion for curious actions – even after he switched to Borussia Mönchengladbach.
A pluck on the hairpiece and …
There Köppel’s new coach Udo Lattek was not at all impressed by the controversial hairpiece of his player: “Horst Köppel wore a toupee back then and I always said in the game that he should take it off because it always blew up.” But he didn’t – and so he was finally the victim of a nasty attack in a game of foals with the Cologne billy goats. And that’s how it happened.
Horst Köppel, who seemed to be extremely weak on his feet that day and went to the ground every time he touched his body, irritated his opponent Horst Simmet to the extreme. At some point it was enough for the Cologne resident and he whispered in the ear of the toupee wearer, rather annoyed because of Köppel’s acting: “If you let yourself go again, I’ll take your hat off.” And then at the next opportunity it actually happened.
Apparently trying to help the man who was lying on the floor again, Simmet tugged lightly at Köppel’s headdress. That was enough. Because, much to the delight of the laughing audience, the hairpiece slipped seriously. But Simmet’s evil action had an effect. Immediately afterwards, the exposed man was suddenly much more stable on his feet again.
The bald head goes back then
But why did Horst Köppel only voluntarily expose himself to all these humiliations? Quite simply, as the native of Stuttgart once frankly admitted: “It wasn’t just about vanity or beauty, there was also a lot of money involved, and I couldn’t say no.” And it was precisely this amount of money that later became Köppel’s problem.
After the hair replacement manufacturer discovered the footballer with the high forehead as the perfect advertising medium for its products and signed it, Köppel quickly realized that he would rather not wear the toupee at the games. It was simply too complicated and time-consuming for him. But Horst Köppel had made a mistake: he did not get out of his long-term and well-paid contract so easily. And so he had to bravely wear his hairpiece until the end of his contract in 1975. But then it was over. Köppel stood on his bald head again – and “simply threw away” the good piece.
By the way: Horst Köppel was not the first Bundesliga professional back then to have signed a deal with a toupee manufacturer – but the first to wear his new hairpiece in a game. Because Charly Dörfel had done a little more skillfully. The HSV star was known at the time for taking the gravel with him as it was on the street.
Dörfel doesn’t find hair jokes so funny
Ben Redelings is a passionate “chronicler of football madness” and a supporter of the glorious VfL Bochum. The bestselling author and comedian lives in the Ruhr area and maintains his legendary treasure trove of anecdotes. For ntv.de he writes down the most exciting and funniest stories on Mondays and Saturdays. More information about Ben Redelings, his current dates and his book with the best columns (“Between Puff and Barcelona”) can be found on his website www.scudetto.de.
And in 1969 he finally managed to negotiate a very special contract, as he once said: “I was the first football professional in Germany to wear a toupee – there was a two-year advertising contract worth 20,000 marks for that.” But in contrast to Horst Köppel, the new hairpiece remained hidden from the general public: “I only trained with Fiffi, never played. The audience then roared: ‘Ey, bald, where is your hair?'”
At that time, Charly Dörfel suffered so much from his missing hair that he became really snotty if someone tried to tease him with it. Then the native of Hamburg hit back verbally in the usual unbridled manner without compromise: “I won’t tell anyone that you only have one little pill man!” Incidentally, he was not allowed to wear the hairpiece during the game because his trainer Georg Knöpfle had forbidden him to do so: “If a player accidentally tears Charly’s toupee off his head, his self-confidence is gone.”
Thank goodness the enterprising village had negotiated his contract a little better than Horst Köppel two years later. But presumably the company had simply – to the chagrin of the then Stuttgart native – learned from its mistake at Dörfel and also included the use in the promotional Bundesliga games in the contract.