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Chronicle
1964-1971
The First Championship and the Broken Goalpost at Bökelberg
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It happened at Weser Stadium: the very first goal in Bundesliga history—but unfortunately, it was scored against Werder. Timo Konietzka netted the first goal on opening day against the Bremen team for Borussia Dortmund. The beaten goalkeeper was Dragomir Ilic, who actually was not supposed to be active anymore; he had to be called back shortly before the 1963/64 season began because Werder’s first six (!) goalkeepers all suffered injuries consecutively before the campaign started. So, it was not an ideal beginning to Werder Bremen’s eventful Bundesliga history. The club finished its inaugural campaign as a founding member in tenth place.
A year later, the “0” in “10” disappeared—Werder were first. During the season in which the city of Bremen celebrated its 1,000th anniversary, SV Werder Bremen clinched its first German championship title. On matchday 17 of the 1964/65 season, Bremen took the top spot in the table and held firm until the end. Record appearance holder Horst-Dieter Höttges, along with Arnold Schütz, Max Lorenz, Walter Nachtwey, were in the squad. Helmut Jagielski (10 goals), Arnold Schütz, Gerhard Zebrowski (11), and Klaus Matischiak (12) were Werder’s top scorers that season, under coach Willi Multhaup.
“I saw how the goal broke, then ducked for cover.”
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In the following years, Werder could not maintain its position in the top group of the league. After the championship came a fourth-place finish, and then the club even dropped to sixteenth. In the 1967/68 season, Werder made a final charge from eighteenth to second place and took the runners-up spot. For the rest of the decade, Werder generally held a mid-table position.
Although the 1970/71 season ended quietly with tenth place, one particular match was truly remarkable.
On April 3, near the end of the match between Borussia Mönchengladbach and Werder Bremen—the score was 1:1—two players crashed into Werder’s goal.
The players emerged unscathed, but the wooden post broke, and the entire goal collapsed. The Bremen side made huge efforts to restore the goal in hopes of a replay, but it didn’t work. The match was abandoned, and Werder was later awarded both points, as the Gladbach hosts failed to provide a replacement goal. Herbert Laumen, one of the players involved, said in an interview with WELT: “I saw how the goal broke, then ducked for cover and finally lay caught like a fish in the net. The North stand dissolved into laughter. It was a spectacle.”
Laumen’s “goalpost incident at Bökelberg” entered football history and actually changed the sport. “The broken post will always be legendary because it had a lasting impact: after that came aluminum goals. And I’ve become immortal,” said Laumen, who later played for Werder Bremen in the 1970s
Contact
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Fax +49 (0) 421 - 49 35 55
SV Werder Bremen
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Franz-Böhmert-Straße 1c
28205 Bremen