LUTZ pfannenstiel

Career German goalkeeper about his crazy MATT BADCOCK talks to a globe-trotting

The life of a maverick goalie

LUTZ PFANNENSTIEL takes a sip of his orange juice and starts telling his remarkable story. A tale that has taken him from Bayern Munich’s reserves on a nomadic world tour, via a ditch in Wimbledon, a prison cell and even St Peter’s Pearly Gates.

An hour with the German goalkeeper at Waterloo station just isn’t enough. Fortunately Pfannenstiel, the only man to play football professionally on all six FIFA continents, has written a brilliant book about his life, perfectly titled

Pfannenstiel was a promising young keeper, but he knew getting into the Bayern team was nigh on impossible with someone like Oliver Kahn in front of him.

His first stop was Asia and Malaysian side Penang before he came to England during Wimbledon’s famous Crazy Gang era.

“The practical jokes, I would call edgy. They caught me running around the park once, stripped me naked, took my clothes and threw me into the ditch.‘What the f**k is going on?’

“I ran back like this (covers his modesty). But it was a normal thing. Somebody pisses in your shampoo bottle, burns a teaspoon on your neck, nails your shoe to the bench, cuts the fingers off your gloves.”

After having a nightmare in a reserve game for Nottingham Forest, he was on his travels again. This time to Orlando Pirates in South Africa, where he heard the loading of a gun pushed against his head.

“Because I was playing for a club supported by the gangsters, I was pretty safe,” he says. “But wearing a baseball cap and not seeing my head, the guy thought I was a random white guy, a tourist, and he put a gun to my head. When he realised who I was he apologised.”

And so the global crusade continued, with the clubs ticking along to their eventual 25. His lowest moment? 101 days in a cell after being wrongly accused of match-fixing in Singapore.

He was thrown in the slammer for essentially playing too well, after conversations with a stranger where he said he thought his team would win.

“If you get locked up for something you have done, you’re paying your debt to society,” says the 41-year-old.

“If you’re getting locked up and the judge tells you that you’re getting locked up for playing too good, for winning games, and then you are waking up next to murderers and drug dealers, then you do ask yourself if there is justice or human thinking in this world.

“I had no bed, no toilet paper. I got treated like an animal. I got punched. I had stitches in my face. I was close to getting raped. I fought to survive. For what I love; playing football.”

Bradford Park Avenue and their late manager Trevor Storton were to prove the place where he got his life up and running after the horrific ordeal. It was also where his life nearly ended.

On Boxing Day 2002, a 50-50 collision with Harrogate Town striker Clayton Donaldson, now with Birmingham City, resulted in a freak injury that left him dead. Three times. He was eventually resuscitated on the pitch.

“I’m dead on the field, even in Non-League that doesn’t happen every day!” he laughs. “Seeing grown-up Yorkshiremen, who kick the shit out of you every day, with tears in their eyes was something very special.

“I was really annoyed with the nurses that I’d been substituted because I thought nothing had happened. It was two or three hours later I realised I’d been dead.”

Now a media pundit and Head of International Relations and Scouting at German club 1899 Hoffenheim, Pfannenstiel is growing his charity Global United, who play games all over the world.

“We’re doing really good things, especially in Africa and South America,” says Pfannenstiel, who has also lived in an igloo to raise awareness of global warming.“I don’t want to be a charity that raises donations. I want to get sponsors who come in to build a soup kitchen to feed 400 kids whose parents have HIV.

“Educate people about climate change, to have a cleaner environment, for footballers to think about our children and grandchildren. We have a big possibility as role models.

“In any stadium in the world, Champions League or Non-League, you’ll find old people and young people, white people and black people, poor people and rich people.

“Football is a medium this world loves. All ages, all races, all religions, everybody. That was my idea and I think we’re getting there.”

And with that he has to go. I don’t even get the chance to ask him about the time he kidnapped a penguin in New Zealand because he thought it would make a nice pet...