After a few weeks he decided to cross over the river Dhünn to the Stadtpark where he joined the youth set-up at Bayer 04 Leverkusen. He made his first appearance for the senior team at the age of 18 and he was a key player straightaway. The 'Lange’ (tall one), as he was known for his height of over six foot, was a defender solid in challenges and good in the air. His other strengths were his calm and fairness.
After the Second World War, he played in the first game and in the following years be became a reliable key player at Bayer 04. He wore the claret shirt of Bayer 04 over 500 times from 1945 to 1956. He wins promotion to the First Oberliga West with the Werkself in 1951, while working in the company health insurance fund at Bayer AG, and he ends his playing career at the age of 34 after a lot of knee injuries. But that's not the end of his connection with football. He gains a lot of merit as a long-standing board member of our club. He is the football chairman in 1960 – comparable to a sporting director today – and he played a significant part in building the team of the early 1960s. After internal disputes, he and his deputy Fredy Mutz, a long-standing goalkeeper in the 1950s, are voted off at the AGM. Five years later on 2 February 1969, he takes up the post again for another two years.
From 1971 he is a spectator at the stadium and training sessions and he accompanies the Bayer 04 first team to away games with his former teammates from the 1950s, particularly the European matches. Peter Berger passed away on 24 September 1999 at the age of 77 and a good part of the football history of Bayer 04 went with him. The 'Lange' would have been 100 years old on 8 August. A good reason to remember him.
Michal ‘Katsche’ Kadlec was born in the Czech town of Vyskov on 13 December 1984. At the age of six, he moved to the Pfalz region in Germany with his parents because his father Miroslav accepted an offer from FC Kaiserslautern where he played as a sweeper for the Red Devils for eight years. Katsche learned German in the kindergarten at Kaiserslautern. And he played football at an early age: first as a teenager at SV Alsenborn and then for FC Kaiserslautern.
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Helmut Röhrig was born in Leverkusen on 14.12.19 44. He learned to play football at Bayer 04 and became a Middle Rhine champion with the U19s in 1963 finishing ahead of FC Köln. He played in the second team at the Werkself in his first year in senior football.
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Bernd Schuster was born in Augsburg on 22.12.19 59. His first club as a teenager was local side SV Hammerschmiede. From that time there was an anecdote that a former groundsman told us when we had a Pokal game in Augsburg in 1993. Bernd was always the first person on the training ground after school. With a running track around the pitch and goals without nets, the young Bernd practised free kicks and corners in the knowledge that he had to collect the ball himself. In that way he not only practised his technique but also worked on his stamina as a teenager.
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Wolfgang ‘Wolle’ Rolff was born on 26.12.1959 in Lamstedt, a community in the Lower Saxony administrative district of Cuxhaven. He started his football career at TSV Lamstedt. He moved on to OSC Bremerhaven with the U17s as he trained to be a retail salesman. He started in senior football at the Nordsee Stadium in Bremerhaven.
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The 1969/70 season begins with four defeats for Bayer 04. That puts the team coached by Theo Kirchberg bottom of the table. The Werkself only lift themselves out of the relegation zone on Matchday 10 with a 4-2 away win in Marl-Hüls. The position in the table improves over the course of the season.
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