Siggi Held Held is an interesting player to me. It looks like his forte was as a creative setup man. With Manfred Burgsmueller as a teammate that's apparently all he needed.
Calle Del'Haye Del'Haye certainly has one of the more interesting and mysterious names in the Bundesliga. I've seen several renderings of his first name to the point where I don't know which one is the right one. In any case I've never seen a rendering of Karl-Heinz anywhere but here. His last name is equally unusual. You must have a story about his family background. He contributed two goals - the fourth and ninth - in that infamous 12:0 humiliation of Dortmund on the final day of the 1977-78 season. That was pretty much the highlight of his Bundesliga career. By the time he joined Duesseldorf he must have had nothing left because in his 2 seasons there he failed to score even a single goal.
Allan Simonsen After using his first two Bundesliga seasons with Moenchengladbach to get untracked Simonsen had himself a good little career in the league and added a legitimate outside scoring threat which meant that opponents couldn't concentrate on the bigger inside threat posed by Jupp Heynckes. Here, again, it looks like a Simonsen photo was forgotten.
Karl-Heinz Rummenigge Rummenigge was certainly an elegant striker if nothing else. One goal that I remember was a nice chip over the goalkeeper in the Bielefelder Almstadion right at the end of a game won 4:2 by Bayern during the 1982-83 season.
Bruno Labbadia Labbadia was a Bundesliga gypsy. In his career in the league he played for not only Kaiserslautern and Bayern but also Hamburg, Cologne, Bremen and Bielefeld, as well as Darmstadt and Karlsruhe in the Second Bundesliga. His best season at the top level was 1994-95 playing for Cologne when he scored 14 times. Many of his other seasons were forgettable but he did manage double figures in goals four other times.
Hans Walitza Walitza only played four of his fourteen years of pro soccer in the Bundesliga and of those four the last one with Nuernberg - 1978-79 - was basically a washout. Given that I'd say it's generous of you to include him here.
Thomas Allofs I can't help but wonder what that six sided star on Allofs' chest is all about, but I don't want this post ending up in the racism thread. He had a three year spell with Cologne in addition to his stints with the above clubs. He seemed like a decent striker back in those days.
Re: Thomas Allofs He was one of Hamburg's best players during the mid-1980s. His 1982-83 season was superb for a player of his kind. His job was not to score goals. A player like him is hard to judge based on statistics. The beginning years of his career were before the Bundesliga was founded (early-1960s). In 1970, he decided to move to Switzerland were he played successfully for another 5 years, most of the time as a sweeper. (forgot which club). Various sources. Initially I planned to use fussballdaten's gallery as my source but they disallowed any linking to BigSoccer after a while. Pics of every Bundesliga Bayern player can be found at this site: http://www.bayernbaeda.de/ Click on "Datenbank" on the right half of the screen and then on "Spieler" on the left side and there'll you find a gallery. He was one of the best attacking midfielders of the mid-1980s, his peak season of course being 1986-87. He somewhat lost his form after that. Franz Beckenbauer wanted to give him a place in the national team but only as a forward. Uwe Rahn didn't like to be used as a forward, he insisted on being used as a midfielder. Franz soon had enough of that and that was his international career. After that he kinda lost it. I wonder if he regrets his stubborness today. He started out as a midfielder whose job was not to score goals. His numbers picked up by 1978 when he sensationally topped the goal scorers table in 1978-79. In 1981, he became the biggest transfer in Bundesliga history to that date when he moved from Düsseldorf to archrivals Cologne. In Cologne he struggled a lot in his first two seasons there (which cost him his place in the 1982 World Cup squad). He then picked up steam again by 1983 and remained one of the best forwards in the Bundesliga up until 1987 when he went to France. He wasn't used as a center forward by HSV - in his first Hamburg season (77-78), Fredi Keller had that job. Keegan played more as a right winger (with Volkert on the left), but basically a more free-roaming role than that of a classic winger. From 1978 to 1980 Hrubesch was the center forward and Keegan perfected his role as the free-roaming forward who had licence to play anywhere up front as he wished (similar to Rummenigge). As Burgsmüller himself recently said, his problem in the national team was that Helmut Schön and later Jupp Derwall did not know a player of his kind and how to use him. He was basically a midfielder (though he used to play center forward for Essen in the mid-70s before Hrubesch debuted) who sneaked his way into the penalty box time and again scoring his goals. So he was a bit of a mix between a classic "Strafraumstürmer" (poacher) and a midfielder. His bad luck was that Germany had plenty of capable pure strikers and excellent midfielders, it appeared there was no real need for a type of player embodying both. From the 1960s right up to the mid-1990s, it was common to number each player from 1 to 11 (can't be done these days as every player has a set number, often totally void of any of the old numbering logic). Thus even if a team lacked a "classic" number 10 playmaker, they had to give that number to someone. That's how players like Tenhagen (basically a defensive midfielder or center back, sometimes sweeper) ended up with the number 10 shirt at times. The shirt numbering system was traditionally as follows: 1-Goalie-2-Right Back-3-Left Back-4-Center Back-5-Sweeper-6-Defensive Midfielder-7-Right Winger-8-Right Midfielder-9-Center Forward-10-Playmaker/Left Midfielder-11-Left Wing There were variations of course. Some clubs gave the 6 to their center back and the 4 to the defensive midfielder (the English tradition, Cologne springs to mind), some clubs even used the South American system with the two central defenders wearing #3 and #4 instead of #5 and #4 and the left back #5 - the German national team in fact used that system between 1978 and 1982, totally against the tradition of the previous years. I still don't know how the otherwise traditional DFB side of those days came up with such a remarkable change in the precious numbering system, for example, left back Bernhard Dietz wore the #5 shirt which was previously always the libero's number - made most famous by Beckenbauer - and the libero wore number 3 which always had been the left back's number. During the actual tournaments (1980 and 1982) though, all this traditional number was thrown over board anyway with the right back wearing number 20 instead of number 2 and the libero wearing number 15 instead of number 5 etc. Jürgen Grabowski started out as a right winger and then gradually developed into a number 10 midfield player. In both roles he belonged to Europe's finest players. He was nicked "Calle" most of the time (not sure if his name was only Karl or Karl-Heinz) and when he came to Bayern, fans nicked him "Der Weisse Hai". This was the title of Spielberg's "Jaws" in Germany and is translated as "The White Shark" ("Hai" [shark] sounds almost exactly like "Haye"). When he came to Bayern in 1980, he struggled to adapt to the new system. Pal Csernai wanted to use him in midfield instead as an outside right. He had two good seasons at Bayern in 1982-83 and 1983-84 though, when he had broken through into the starting XI.