Keeper Of Dreams

At the age of 28, German goalkeeper Lars Leese was catapulted from a minor league football field somewhere near Cologne to a small industrial town in the north of England. Something of a culture shock, certainly, but nothing compared to finding himself in goal for Barnsley playing the mighty Liverpool at Anfield in front of over 45,000 spectators. Plucked from obscurity, Leese experienced in real life what thousands of boys – and men – can only dream of: stepping out of the crowd and onto a Premiership pitch.

Lars Leese’s foray into the wild world of professional football lasted only three years, but the story of his stratospheric rise and equally alarming descent – at once shocking, comic and sad – is an indispensable antidote to the traditional footballing biography, and a unique outsider’s view of English life. Not since you last read the back pages of the News of the World will you have seen such an accurate picture of life as a Premiership footballer.

Ronald Reng was based in London as a sports correspondent from 1996 until 2001. He has written about English football for, among others, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Zurich’s Tagesanzeiger. He currently lives in Barcelona, where he covers Spanish football for the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

The national league system in Germany is not exactly analogous with the English system, so here are the nearest equivalents in terms of level of skill and height of profile (details as at 2002/03).

Bundesliga – the FA Barclaycard Premiership
Zweite (Second) Bundesliga – the Nationwide Football League Division One
Regionalliga – sometimes referred to in Germany as the Dritte (or Third) Liga, this regional semi-professional league was established in 1994 and is roughly at the same standard as the Nationwide Football League Divisions Two and Three combined
Oberliga – a fully amateur league, comparable to the Nationwide Football Conference (with teams such as Stevenage Borough and Halifax Town)
the Landesliga is next in Germany’s pyramidal set-up, though it does not feature in this book; a rough equivalent would be the Unibond Northern Premier League, the Dr Martens Southern Premier League and the Ryman Football League, with teams such as Hednesford Town, Accrington Stanley and Canvey Island
Bezirksliga, to which Lars’ first team, Neitersen, gets promoted – a league such as Combined Counties (the likes of Farnham Town and Walton Casuals) would be closest
Kreisliga, the lowest feeder league in Germany – Neitersen played in Kreisliga A, therefore comparable to clubs in the premier divisions of leagues at the lowest level of the English National League System such as the Midland Combination (Rugby Town, Southam United), the Northern Alliance (Spittal Rovers, Harraby Catholic Club) and the Herts Senior County League (Bushey Rangers, Wormley Rovers)

IN BARNSLEY’S PACKED Oakwell stadium, 18,661 spectators were waiting for the game to get going again. They were waiting for Lars Leese to tie his bootlaces.

Sitting on the subs’ bench, he’d started all over again for the fourth time: pulled the laces tight, made a knot, and tied the long ends all the way around the boot and under the sole, as professional footballers do for no discernible reason. Then another knot, and a bow. His trembling hands failed him once again. ‘Hey! For God’s sake, just take your time! They won’t be able to play without you,’ Danny Wilson, Barnsley’s young manager, yelled at his substitute goalkeeper. He was trying to sound comforting. He sounded tense.

It happens in about one football match in a thousand: the goalkeeper is injured and the substitute keeper has to be brought on. Lars had fully expected the Premier League match on 26 August 1997 between Barnsley and Bolton Wanderers to be one of the other 999. Two hours before the start of play he had told his wife’s grandmother, ‘Gran, please, do give it a rest, I’m not going to play. I’m a substitute goalkeeper. Do you hear me? Sub-sti-tute!’ Grandma Lina had come all the way from Germany on a visit to the redbrick family home on Winter Avenue in the Barnsley suburb of Royston, and she was about to see the first football match of her life – and she couldn’t for the life of her understand why her granddaughter’s husband wasn’t playing. Before they set off for the stadium, she’d insisted on being allowed to take a picture of Lars. ‘Before your first professional match,’ she’d said.

Two snapshots later, Lars had headed off with his colleague and neighbour, the Slovenian international Ales Krizan, and driven the ten minutes to Oakwell with a view to having a pleasant evening on the subs’ bench. At first he hadn’t even put his number 13 shirt on. He was sitting on the edge of the pitch in his sweatshirt, boots untied, when Bolton midfielder Jamie Pollock cannoned into Barnsley goalkeeper David Watson in an ill-considered tackle. For a moment there was silence as the spectators waited for Watson to get up. When the four paramedics carried him right past the subs’ bench and into the stadium’s catacombs, Lars wasn’t looking. He was too preoccupied with himself.

I said to myself, ‘A capacity stadium, and you’re going to be a goalkeeper for a professional team – it’s the moment you’ve been dreaming about your whole life. You should be pleased.’ But of course I wasn’t pleased. I had stage fright. Well, stage fright – I was bricking it. When Watson was on the floor my first thought was, ‘Stop arsing around, please get back up again!’ I tried to give myself orders: ‘Don’t lose it now, Lars.’ And a moment later I was again thinking, ‘Watson, please get up!’ My thoughts raced around like that during my warm-up. I pretended to do a couple of gymnastic exercises, but actually I couldn’t stretch my leg muscles at all. My knees were so weak that I’d have keeled over. I swung my arms in a circle as I walked, trying to give the spectators the notion that I was really up for it. And then I couldn’t even get my bootlaces tied. I felt everybody’s eyes were on me. Eighteen thousand spectators are looking at you,’ I thought, although of course that was nonsense, because loads of them were watching Watson being carried off, or just chatting to one another.

Watson had suffered a groin strain and concussion, doctors at Barnsley General Hospital would confirm the following day, but at Oakwell the cheerful mood returned in a matter of minutes. The spectators were determined not to let anything rob them of their exuberance. This was Barnsley’s third home match of the 1997/98 season; they’d lost the first two, but there was still a holiday atmosphere at the ground. For the first time in 110 years the club was playing in the top flight of English football, in a league that is, along with the Spanish Primera Liga and the Italian Serie A, one of the most exciting in modern football. ‘It’s as though something has dropped on us from Mars,’ said Michael Spinks, the club secretary.

The cheering swelled when Lars finally managed to get his laces tied, at the fifth go, and walked up beside the linesman, ready to join the game. ‘Leece! Leece! Leece!’ came the roar. After a good two months in Barnsley, Lars Leese – pronounced in German Layz-eh – knew what they meant and who they meant.

Before the six-foot-five-inch substitute keeper sprinted on to the grass in the 29th minute of play with the score at 1–1, Danny Wilson grabbed his arm and gave him one last piece of advice.

I wanted to be like a tiger. Toni Schumacher, my childhood hero, once put it like this: ‘The goalkeeper is the big cat, leaping at the ball as it would leap at its prey.’ So I did my best tiger act – and nothing happened. Not a single ball came towards my goal. That’s just awful for a goalkeeper. You can’t be active; all you can do is wait. Your thoughts torment you. ‘Let the first ball be a good one, and it’ll all be fine.’ And the bloody ball didn’t come. You sketch out these horrific scenarios: the first ball a back-pass to you, but you miss your footing, kick it to your opponent and he sticks it in the net. That’s the way your mind is going. It may have been five minutes, but to me it seemed like three quarters of an hour before the ball came to me for the first time. I dashed off my goal-line like a madman, out of the penalty area, out on to the left wing (from my point of view). It was a long pass into empty space. I slid over the grass to tackle the opposing striker, and there I was with the ball at my feet about two or three yards ahead of him. With all my strength I booted it high into the stand. After that, something inside me seemed to collapse and the applause and roar of the crowd swept over me like wildfire.

He can still hear the noise four years later in the living-room of his house in the town of Hürth, near Cologne.

Lars Leese is sitting on a blue couch, with a glass of water on the table in front of him, that evening at Oakwell playing out before his eyes. He is so stirred by the memory of that Bolton game that his pupils seem to gleam. This time he can enjoy it.

‘It’s all so far away now,’ he says, then reconsiders his words. They sound wrong, because a moment ago, when he was telling the story of his debut in professional football, everything had felt so recent. And his time with Barnsley is actually a long way off in another sense. Lars is 32, a good age for a goalkeeper, but now, every morning, he leaves his house to ‘flog pencils’ in the Rhineland. That’s how he refers, with cheerful self-irony, to his job selling office supplies. He’s back where he started: Lars Leese, a friendly young businessman from Cologne.

His excursion into the world of professional football lasted only three years, but it will remain a unique career, because Lars Leese did what the rest of us can only dream of. Those of us who at the age of 43 slip on a shirt with the number 18 and the name KLINSMANN on the back, go for a kick-around in the park having made a point of drinking two pints fewer than usual the evening before. Or who, at the age of 32, smile at the supermarket cashier on a Saturday morning when in our mind’s eye we’re taking the ball off Andi Möller with a clean tackle. Or who, at 25, are playing in an ashpit in the lowest amateur league, dreaming that one day Franz Beckenbauer might run out of petrol around the corner, come to the sports ground and give us a job with Bayern Munich.

At the age of 22, he was playing for Neitersen in Kreisliga A, Westerwald-Sieg region;¹ six years later he secured Barnsley’s 1–0 victory over four-times European Cup winners Liverpool in front of 41,000 spectators at Anfield Road. A part-time footballer had become a professional in the legendary Premier League, right up there with greats like Bert Trautmann and Eike Immel, the only German goalkeepers to have played in England before him. No one has ever risen like that before, and probably no one will do so again, now that the big clubs are sending their scouts off to youth tournaments as far away as Brazil, lest they miss out on any 15-year-old talent. But in this case a man who worked as a buyer of computer products for the company Raab-Karcher until he was 26, and who supported FC Cologne on the terraces on Saturdays, rose out of the crowd of spectators and found his way straight on to the pitch.

I’d been covering English football for the Süddeutsche Zeitung for two years when I first came across Lars Leese. My first thought on hearing his story was, ‘That can’t be true.’ My second was, ‘Hang on, I know this story.’ For, just as unexpectedly, I myself had become a professional a thousand times – in my daydreams, when I went to the park in my Klinsmann shirt or tackled Andi Möller as I stood at the supermarket cash-desk. The truth is, of course most of us could never have carried off a career like that, even if Beckenbauer really had run out of petrol on the edge of our sports ground. Of course Lars Leese has more talent than the rest of us put together; he played in the youth eleven at FC Cologne before he gave up high-level sport at the age of 16 ‘because, like half a million others, I discovered beer and women’. But when we hear his story, with all the little chance events that helped to catapult him from the lowly Kreisliga into one of the best leagues in the world, we can go on quietly dreaming. What might have happened that time, in the 43rd minute of that school tournament game when the coach of Offenbach Kickers was watching, if I’d shot instead of dribbled? What might have become of me if I hadn’t pulled out of that regional selection team because I wanted to go to the ice-cream parlour with that dark-haired girl from Year 11.

During half-time in that Barnsley–Bolton Premier League match, Lars Leese still felt more like one of us, the daydreamers, than one of them, the hardened professionals. He spent only a minute in the dressing-room before Danny Wilson sent him out again, on his own, to face a few warm-up shots from the other subs. There had been no time for that before his hectic substitution.

It was just a warm-up, I know, who cares, but I thought, ‘Oh, no. Just don’t make any mistakes.’ With some shots I didn’t even dive, I just played the ball back with my foot: I was so worried the ball might slip under my body and the whole stadium would laugh. With every shot I caught I heard the crowd oohing in the terraces behind me. I turned around a few times and smiled at the spectators. I wanted to make a point of looking casual. Then the teams finally emerged from the dressing-rooms. In England, they always sprint out on to the field like madmen, looking like characters in a computer game. ‘Concentrate, concentrate on the ball,’ I said to myself like a mantra. Somehow I had to find my way back to reality, and fast.

Two minutes into the second half, the Macedonian forward Georgi Hristov put Barnsley in the lead, bringing the score to 2–1. From then on Bolton put pressure on Barnsley’s goal. Daniela, Lars’ wife, was in the grandstand. Every time a Bolton player crossed the halfway line she murmured, ‘Don’t let them score, please, don’t let them score,’ and twisted her wedding ring around her finger. ‘I thought I had to help him save the ball,’ she said later. ‘Somehow I wanted to beam strength over to Lars. I’d always believed that at some point during his training he would become better than the number one goalkeeper, and that he would get to play. And then it all happened so suddenly. I had no idea: am I supposed to be pleased now, or is it unfair to be pleased because the other goalkeeper has been seriously injured? My head was full of cotton wool. My nerves were in shreds.’ At first, Grandma Lina hadn’t even taken her seat next to Daniela. When she’d looked down from the main stand she’d felt dizzy. She’d clung on tightly to a steward, and although she’d only been able to talk to him in German he’d understood that she wanted to sit further up, under the roof. The steward found a seat for her. When Daniela turned around she saw that Grandma Lina was anything but troubled, in fact she was clearly quite content. Hadn’t she said? Of course Lars would play.

Although Bolton were now dominating the game, they didn’t create many chances. At one point a high pass came through the middle; Bolton’s Peter Beardsley slipped behind Barnsley’s defence and headed the ball at the near corner from 25 feet away. Lars automatically stuck out his foot and cleared the ball. On another occasion a free-kick flew over Barnsley’s defence. Lars saved it.

In the press-box it was nearly time for match reports to be called in, and the journalists were having to come up with definitive judgements while the game was still being played. The Sun’s Michael Morgan wrote of the new goalkeeper, ‘A convincing start for his career in British football.’ Virtually no one in the stadium knew it was his very first game as a professional. Lars Leese had been announced in Britain as ‘the man who had given up a glamorous future with Bayer Leverkusen in the Champions League for Barnsley’, as Morgan wrote. In fact, Lars had been with Leverkusen for only a year as third-choice goalkeeper. Before he was transferred to Barnsley, he hadn’t even sat on the subs’ bench.

‘Lars, stick the damn ball down the damn channel, for Christ’s sake!’ bellowed Danny Wilson.

The goal-kicks that had so tormented him in the horrific scenarios in his head during that first half went increasingly badly for Lars. He was supposed to send them out into the free space on the wing known as the channel, but Lars no longer cared about that. So long as he kicked the ball high and far and it didn’t cross the touchline. So long as his internal horror movie didn’t become a reality.

I had gone through the second half as though at high speed; the 45 minutes seemed more like ten, nothing more than that. You lose your sense of time, you’re so tense. For 45 minutes you do nothing but watch the ball and anticipate where it could go. ‘Where could my opponent play it now, how could things get dangerous?’ Even if things don’t get dangerous, all you see is the ball, and you tense yourself for what might happen if your team-mate misses it. And all of a sudden the game’s over – a 2–1 win, the first home victory for Barnsley in the Premier League, a historic game. I don’t know what got into me, I’ve never done it before or since, but my first reaction was this: I lifted my hands into the air as though holding an imaginary cup, looked up at my wife, saw her crying up in the stand and formed a heart in the air. If I was a true romantic like Casanova, I’d say that I did it because I could never have managed it without her. The truth is, I don’t know why I did it. Not a single notion. In the dressing-room the manager yelled, ‘Fuckin’ great, fuckin’ quality!’ He could have said anything; I was completely reeling. I set off home with Daniela and her grandma, and as we drove through the streets the fans immediately recognised me. Of course they did – we were in an open-top Golf with German number plates.

‘That’s exactly what happened, except for one thing – you weren’t there. You went home with Ales Krizan. There was just Grandma and me in the Golf,’ says Daniela, who has put the children – Vivian, six, and Christopher, four – to bed and has joined us in the living-room.

‘So how come I can clearly remember what it was like when the fans beeped their horns at the traffic lights?’ Lars asks.

‘Because I told you about it,’ says Daniela, and she tells him again. ‘The people went completely wild, they were so happy, so carried away. They overtook us, wound down the window and shouted “Leece! Leece! Leece!” I had to tell Grandma Lina, “Stay calm now, Grandma, don’t strip off and dance on the bonnet!”’

‘And I wasn’t even there?’ Lars asks, still amazed at the tricks his memory has played on him.

I didn’t get to bed until about four or five in the morning. I’d given an interview for the local radio station Hallam FM at the stadium. ‘Just ask me easy questions, I’m a bit over-excited,’ I told the reporter. When I got home from Oakwell I just sat there and smoked one cigarette after another. I had a terrible headache from the tension during the match. Nonetheless I ran through each individual scene from the Bolton game in my head once again, even the radio interview. What could you have done better, and how? I reviewed the same moments – the corner, the free-kick, the guy from the radio – again and again until five o’clock in the morning. The next day I went straight to the supermarket and bought all the papers. I was … how shall I put it? What would you say? Happy? Yes, that’s it, I was happy, incredibly happy, but happiness wasn’t the strongest feeling. Funny, isn’t it? No, I … I felt a mixture of a lot of pressure and a little responsibility. I …

ON THE DRIVE into the Westerwald, Lars Leese smoked three cigarettes: one on the A3 as far as Hennef, one on the B road towards Altenkirchen, one to the junction for Neitersen. He thought it would help him win the match he was about to play. Not the smoking itself, but the fact that the three Marlboros followed the rhythm of motorway, B road, town. He was superstitious about things like that. Later, on the many Sundays that followed, he would stick religiously to that ritual. It was on 3 September 1989, on the way from Cologne to his first game for Sportfreunde Neitersen, that he first started it.

He had bigger matches behind him, games in which he had been playing for nothing less than his future in professional football – or at least that was what he had believed back then, when he played as goalkeeper in the under-16 side of three-times German champions FC Cologne. Three years had passed since then. Now he would be in goal again for the first time in a championship match, in Kreisliga A, just a couple of steps up from Kreisliga C, the lowest division in Germany. Amateur sport.

If people who have never played in a local league, or who would never think of doing so, went along one Sunday to see a game played by 22 more or (mostly) less athletic men on a sticky ashpit, they might think it’s just a bit of harmless fun. That couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s serious stuff. Kreisliga players buy football boots for 249 marks (£79.99) and imagine they’ll help them to put in better crosses; after all, they are the boots David Beckham wears. Kreisliga teams made up entirely of architects, office buyers and roofers go running in the woods three times a week in July, but not for the rest of the year. They don’t need to, they’ve already got themselves fit for the season.

When I went to Neitersen 12 years later, on Lars Leese’s trail, I felt I was grown up enough not to take the keenness of the Kreisliga players too seriously. And then, one cool summer afternoon, I sat with Jürgen Sanner, one of Lars’ former team-mates, at the sports ground in Neitersen, and as we talked about Lars we were gripped with enthusiasm. We looked at that pitiful, abandoned ashpit and started to talk about our modest, unimportant victories in amateur football. ‘When we became Kreisliga champions in 1991, I stopped. I felt things couldn’t get any better for me,’ Sanner said, and it sounded as though he was confiding an intimate secret to me. And of course I understood him: only Kreisliga players know that their sporting lives are probably not going to get much better than a local derby victory over a team like Eintracht Guckheim. But that doesn’t stop them from believing in the importance of their game.

Lars, who could tell the difference between FC Cologne and Sportfreunde Neitersen, between ambitious and amateurish football, should have smiled at the determination of the weekend players. But he was the worst of the lot. When he turned up for his first game in the Westerwald that Sunday he had to go to the toilet three times. And that had nothing to do with superstition.

There’s just as much pressure in a Kreisliga game as there is in a Bundesliga match. I said that in Neitersen, and I really believed it. Because I put myself under so much pressure, because I concentrated on the match for so long beforehand that I couldn’t imagine anyone being under any more pressure than that. It never even occurred to me that the amount of pressure might have something to do with whether you are being watched by 18,000 or 180 spectators. You don’t often get 18,000 spectators in the Kreisliga.

Word had already spread about Lars Leese throughout the Westerwald. ‘EX-INTERNATIONAL KEEPER LARS LESER IN NEITERSEN’ the Rhein-Zeitung proclaimed; Sportfreunde Neitersen had taken on a 20-year-old former youth international goalkeeper from Cologne and would be using him for the first time on Sunday in their away game against SV Alsdorf. The headline was a bit bigger than the one next to it, about the women’s handball team from Weyerbusch, but the tone of the report was just as sober, just as unexcited. As though a former youth international turned up in the Westerwald every few weeks to play in an amateur division near the bottom of Germany’s league structure. The article managed to get a few minor details slightly wrong – other than Lars’ surname. The name of the youth selection team for which he had played at the age of 14 had actually been Mittelrhein, not Germany. But no one on that Sunday at the sports ground in Alsdorf was particularly troubled. Normally about 100 to 150 spectators would have been standing on the sidelines, near the beer stall; at the Neitersen match there were only 40. The remaining 80 or 90 had formed a mob behind Lars’ goal.

Not long after kick-off, Alsdorf got a corner and Lars heard one of their players shouting, ‘Come on, get one past the international!’ But that didn’t happen that afternoon. Even if he didn’t quite play like an international, Lars did enough not to do his new reputation any harm. On Monday, the Rhein-Zeitung rewarded his performance with an article of a length usually reserved for a Kreisliga game. The report on the match comprised a single sentence: ‘In Alsdorf, the game between coach Roland Kölsch’s protégés and Sportfreunde Nietersen ended in a goalless draw in line with the performances.’

That stuff about the youth international goalkeeper may not have been quite correct, but in essence, says Rudolf Bellersheim, chairman and enthusiastic patron of Sportfreunde Neitersen, it was true. ‘Lars was better than goalkeepers in the Westerwald usually are,’ he claims over lunch in his house in Neitersen.

‘He saved every penalty!’ Bellersheim’s son Arnd butts in enthusiastically.

‘Yeah. You see the legends that are still circulating about Lars hereabouts, even 12 years later,’ says Bellersheim senior.

On the road out of the village, his name is written in letters as big as those on the sign for the next village. WALTER-SCHEN 3 KM it says on the yellow signpost, BELLERSHEIM on the white one above it. It refers to his petrol company, which he runs with his brother Horst. With 20 filling stations and 180 employees, Bellersheim rules over the community the way big businessmen in small villages often do, personal and patriarchal at the same time. Most people in the village call him ‘Bello’, and he thinks nothing of sending one of his employees into the forest at lunchtime to take Carlo, his young dog, to do his business.

‘He’s bound to tell you the story about Schalke,’ Leese had said to me, and sure enough, Rudolf Bellersheim, 56 years old, eyes gleaming, tells of how, once in his life, he played a friendly against the great Schalke 04 (seven times Bundisliga champions) for Altenkirchen, a nearby village team. ‘Football,’ says Bellersheim with a sigh. Sometimes, he says, he doesn’t go to the sports ground in Neitersen to watch because he thinks to himself, ‘You can’t go and stand at the sports ground every Sunday.’ But then he can hardly bear to hear the results of a team in which he invests a little of his fortune from one year to the next. And he only phones a quarter of an hour after the end of a match. To do so any earlier would bring bad luck.

‘But, now, let me have a think,’ he continues. ‘We’re always saying “Lars introduced that” – but what?’

But surely that’s an old story: when the goalkeeper shouts the code word Leo, the defenders know to keep their heads down, and the keeper comes out to claim the ball. That’s been done on German football grounds for decades; Lars Leese can’t possibly have introduced it.

‘Well, OK,’ says Bellersheim, ‘but he was the first one to do it properly. Leooo! Really loud, you know, and bang!, he’s taken the cross. He had complete control of the penalty area.’

‘That’s it! When we were lagging behind and we got a corner shortly before the end, there was Lars right up at the front, trying to head in a goal. The goalkeeper in the opponents’ penalty area! No one in the Westerwald had ever seen anything like it.’

So the rumour quickly spread that they had a high-flier in Neitersen. But the mystery remained: why had this goalkeeper ended up there, of all places? Why did a 20-year-old from Cologne borrow his mother’s VW Golf every week and drive 69 kilometres there and 69 kilometres back to play in a league for which he was clearly overqualified? To play in a village with 850 inhabitants he had never heard of before? There were plenty of theories. Footballers like nothing more than a good rumour, and in this respect at least Kreisliga weekend players are no different from the professionals. On Monday morning at the workplace, the news about the Sunday games is passed on, and on Tuesday evening after training in the dressing-room of dozens of village clubs impressions are formed and fixed. And when Friday evening arrives in rural areas such as the Westerwald, where the villages have quaint names like Oberirsen and Mittelirsen but the bars are called Cheyenne or Gecko, by the seventh beer rumours have turned into myths.

They’ve got a job for Leese in Neitersen. This fantastic job. And at lunchtime he goes training.

But, as quickly as it had formed, the idea was revealed to be false. During his first year of playing in Neitersen, Lars was finishing his technical exams at business school, and he later trained as a wholesale and foreign sales rep with Rover in Cologne. Still, the rumour persisted.

Leese is coining it down in Neitersen. He’s making more than a Zweite Bundesliga player. And it’s all tax free.

It’s a favourite topic of conversation in amateur football – the huge sums of money some players earn from their kickabouts. Even down in the lowest divisions there are some players who get 1,500 marks (about £500) a month, cash in hand, from the local electrical goods trader or car dealer for two lots of training and one game a week. Every amateur footballer who takes himself at all seriously knows such a player, or at least claims to have heard of one from a friend of a friend. In the end, many Kreisliga players come to believe that such payments are the norm – but only at other clubs, of course. In fact, most of them play for the 10 marks (£3.50) bonus if they win and a free dinner in the club canteen. But who’s interested in the truth of the matter when it’s so boring? Thanks to the commitment of Herr Bellersheim the businessman, Sportfreunde Neitersen were prime candidates for the wilder realms of speculation.

‘“Here comes FC Bellersheim,” they always say,’ Bellersheim remarks, and it’s hard to tell if he’s hurt or proud. ‘Bayern Munich get big-time envy: we have it small-time.’

In his first season, 1989/90, Lars really did get 300 marks (£100) a month in expenses, most of it spent on petrol, plus 30 marks (£10) as a victory bonus. In the summer of 1990, when he was wondering out loud whether it really was worth all that driving, Bellersheim dispelled any doubts the goalkeeper harboured before the start of the season by giving him an extra 3,000 marks (£1,000). Expense allowance, they call it in the Kreisliga. But Lars could have got that kind of money in Cologne from another amateur club, so again, why travel to Neitersen? There was only one possible explanation.

It seemed that explained everything. To almost every game, and often even to training, Lars brought his best friend Holger Wacker along. They had been classmates at school. Three years earlier, aged seventeen, they’d even been held back a year together. So, not only did it seem perverse to some people in the Westerwald that someone from Cologne should come to Kreisliga games in Neitersen, he also always had a man with him who didn’t even play football himself.

But it turned out quite quickly that that theory didn’t stand up either, because Lars didn’t just impress his team-mates with his casual manner; on Fridays at the disco he swept the girls off their feet as well. His friend Holger came along because he liked it in the provinces, and he liked the girls, the companionship, the popularity enjoyed by his close friend Lars.

Still, if he only got pocket money out of it and he wasn’t a poof, why did Lars Leese go to Neitersen to play football?

When I told my friends in Cologne, ‘Guys, I’m playing in the Westerwald from now on,’ they answered, ‘Are you round the bend or what? Driving all that distance just to play in the Kreisliga? You could do that in Cologne on any street-corner.’ So I just lied to them, and told them I was getting loads of money in Neitersen. Then they said, ‘Oh, fine. We’d do the same.’ I couldn’t tell them the truth; I didn’t even know myself why I went all the way there once or twice a week to train and play. It had started when I happened to be playing in a pub-side tournament in the Westerwald and someone from Neitersen showed up: hey, I was really fantastic; did I fancy playing for them at some point in the future? Maybe that was it: I felt that there was still someone, somewhere, even if they were in the back of beyond, who thought highly of me as a footballer. They gave me that feeling in Neitersen. It didn’t matter that it was at the lowest level, all of a sudden I was seen as a great keeper. Maybe that was it. Maybe I had always craved that recognition since I’d first chucked the ball away in an attack of adolescent rage when I was playing for FC Cologne – but actually it goes back further than that, to when I was 13, in fact.

Very few children who play for a professional club at the age of 13 think they’re in with a good chance of one day being professional footballers; most children who play for a professional club at the age of 13 know that they will one day be professional footballers. The idea that they mightn’t make it is absolutely unthinkable. The fact that there are thousands of boys with the same dream, but only about 950 professional jobs in Germany, doesn’t occur to them. Not at 13. It’s an age when children are wooed from a radius of up to 100 kilometres by Bundesliga teams. Lars Leese was selected by FC, as the city’s first club is known in Cologne, as though there is only one FC in the whole world. Until then Lars had played for SC Fortuna – the second, smaller professional club in the city – and in Klettenberg Park practically every day before and after school until nightfall.

At least there he wasn’t alone. He was seven when his parents divorced. All of a sudden the flat in Luxemburger Strasse was empty. Ute Leese had moved out to live with her new husband in Hürth, and Lars’ sister Tamara went with her; Wolfgang Leese, who kept custody of Lars, was at work, in a railway signal box. Even today, Lars Leese can’t bear to come home to an empty flat.

He made the park his home. On the way there, down Luxemburger Strasse, a long, wide arterial road to the south of Cologne, he passed a driving school. He often spat against the window. He thought a monster lived behind it.

My father had dinned that into me. The driving school belonged to my stepfather, and he was the monster who had stolen my mother. When you’re seven you tend to believe what your father says, and my father was my hero. Sometimes he took me to his workplace, and we would spend hours kicking a ball about in his signal box; it made far more of a racket than any railway train. He was the striker and I was the goalkeeper, of course. He couldn’t get over the fact that my mother had left him, and for a friend of the family. I was just to have nothing more to do with them – he was forever telling me that. He would even stand at the window with a stopwatch when I went to school in the morning, because my mother still ran her stationery shop right beside our flat in Luxemburger Strasse. My father used the stopwatch to check how quickly I got to the next corner, that I didn’t go into my mother’s shop. But there was an awning above my mother’s shop so my father couldn’t see that my mother was standing by the door to give me a quick kiss and a bun for breaktime.

When Lars was 11, his father went into hospital with pancreas problems. Wolfgang didn’t want to leave his son with his mother even for such a short time, so Lars lodged with a friend from the Fortuna youth team in the south Cologne working-class district of Zollstock. The flat there was anything but empty, but among the family’s four children he felt more alone than ever. One of the children was always screaming, and then their mother would start screaming too. He was appalled by the woman, and watched more in horror than astonishment as she opened tins with her teeth in the kitchen. After a fortnight he ran weeping into his mother’s stationery shop.

That evening he came face to face with his stepfather for the first time. Nervously, Lars wondered, ‘Am I allowed to talk to him now, or do I have to confess to my father that I’ve been in the monster’s house?’

Meanwhile, in the hospital, Wolfgang met a new woman and didn’t put up a great deal of resistance when his wife asked for custody of her son.

By the time FC Cologne knocked on his door, Lars Leese had already spent two years living with his mother and stepfather on the Hahnenstrasse estate in the suburb of Hürth. He no longer played football in Klettenberg Park before school, but he still went every afternoon, immediately school was over – and in Germany school stops at lunchtime. If he had training at five o’clock with FC Cologne, his knees were green by the time he showed up. Lars made huge progress almost immediately after he switched clubs, but that had less to do with FC Cologne than it did with the vagaries of puberty. He grew a foot in a year. Before his 15th birthday he was already six foot four inches tall.

To a child’s logic, an invitation from FC Cologne to be a goalkeeper was the highest honour you could get. Among the professionals of FC Cologne in the early eighties was Toni Schumacher, one of the best goalkeepers in the world, so that meant that as an FC youth keeper you would be just as good within a few years. Didn’t it?

Once, during training, Lars ran impetuously out of his goal. He hadn’t a chance of catching the cross, and his fist collided not with the ball but with the head of Günther Baerhausen – incidentally, a player who really would become a professional, in the Zweite Bundesliga withVfL Osnabrück.

‘I’m just trying to get the cross,’ Lars called back, and that meant: Yes, of course I think I’m the new Schumacher.