Stan Libuda: Reinhard “Stan” Libuda was a legend in the Ruhr, a kind of German Garrincha – both at Schalke 04 and Borussia Dortmund. He began at Schalke, became a crowd favourite, then moved to the arch-rivals in Dortmund in 1965, where his famous looping strike helped BVB win the Cup Winners’ Cup in 1966. Two years later he went back to Schalke and captained the side to the 1972 DFB-Pokal. The great mistake of his life came in the 1970/71 Bundesliga match-fixing scandal, when he and several Schalke team-mates took money to throw a game.
Initially banned for life, he was pardoned in 1973 after a year at Racing Strasbourg. Life after football was less kind: illness, hardship, a job in a paper-finishing company thanks to Rolf Rüssmann, a tobacco kiosk once owned by Ernst Kuzorra, then throat cancer. He died in 1996 at just 63, after a stroke.
His popularity remained so deep that even his move between bitter rivals never erased it. The famous fan addition to the evangelist’s slogan still says it all: “No one gets past God … except Stan Libuda.”