ABSTRACT
‘We can systematically comb thoroughly one continent after the other and help our friends in every country to leap in order to smooth their path towards the top of world football. This is their aim. That they might reach it, this is our task.’ These were the conclusions of the elite German trainer, Dettmar Cramer (1978), summarizing his experiences from matches and training in 70 countries. He presented his views in 1978 in a special issue on football in the official West German parliamentary gazette, Das Parlament. Cramer exemplified his vision of the global embrace by the encounter with Saihon Sarr, a 16-year-old, barefooted schoolboy from Bathurst, capital of The Gambia, whom Cramer discovered in 1968. At that time Cramer was the FIFA coach to this West African country, and he introduced the boy into the Gambian national team. He wrote that:
In August 1977 I travelled as coach of FC Bayern to Norway in order to study our UEFA Cup opponents in Mjöndalen, playing at home against the national champions, Lilleström. I did not believe my eyes when I saw an African forward from the home team whose movements seemed familiar to me. After the match we shook hands after a break of nine years. It was Saihon Sarr who had accepted an offer from Mjöndalen to play football there and at the same time to study sport in Oslo. He spoke fluent Norwegian and earned his money at a petrol station. He was 25 years old, married and could afford holidays in his own country. We had long conversations in Mjöndalen, later in Munich and after the return match in Oslo. We have become friends and say, facetiously and reflectively at the same time, ‘To make friends is even more important than to score goals’. But there is, of course, more than simply personal sentimentality in the game. German football trainers have done good things abroad, both for the youth of countries where they were engaged, for the respect of the Federal Republic and for German football (Cramer, 1978: 9).
