Matthias Sindelar: Austria's Greatest Player

In 26 days' time, it will be the 73rd anniversary of Matthias Sindelar's final appearance for a representative XI. He wowed fans with his clever movement, instinctive play and deadly finishing. He was also at the centre of huge controversy surrounding his own death, prompting allegations of murder and suicide due Nazi regime.

Matthias Sindelar

One thing is for sure, he was the greatest footballer Austria has ever produced.

Football in Austria boomed in the twenties with the establishment of a two-tier professional league in 1924. Crowds consistently turned up in their tens of thousands, with crowds of at least 40, 000 seen as the average throughout the country.

Quite simply, aside from Britain, Austria was the place to be when it came to football.

The difference between the British and Continental game however, was that culture dictated football in Britain to be debated in pubs, whereas in Austria, tactics and opinion would be theorised in the coffee houses of Vienna.

This would ultimately be where Austria made its name, leaving Britain far inferior when it came to tactics.

Where the local pub would accommodate the working class punter, coffee houses were accustomed to the intellectuals, who joyfully picked apart the 'beautiful game' to come up with their own, Austrian, style of play.

Each club had its own cafe where players, supporters, directors and writers would mix. Fans of Austria Vienna, the team who Sindelar played for, would meet in the Cafe Parsifal.

It was here that writers thrust Sindelar's name forward to be included in Hugo Meisl's national side - later to become known as the Wunderteam.

Such was his slight figure, he was nicknamed "Der Papierene" - 'the Paperman' - and fans could not get enough of him.

Friedrich Torberg, one of the foremost of the coffee-house writers, wrote about Sindelar: "He was endowed with such an unbelievable wealth of variations and ideas that one could never really be sure which manner of play was to be expected. He just had... genius."

"In a way he had brains in his legs," the theatre critic, Alfred Polgar, wrote, "and many remarkable and unexpected things occurred to them while they were running. Sindelar's shot hit the back of the net like the perfect punch-line, the ending that made it possible to understand and appreciate the perfect composition of the story, the crowning of which it represented."

He was the greatest thing to have happened to Austria. He was arguably the world's first footballing superstar.

He even played himself in a film and supplemented his playing salary by advertising wrist-watches and dairy products, something unheard of in the 1930s.

Sindelar's first full international appearance came in 1931, when Austria played Scotland - who were at the time, in the forerunning as one of the world's strongest sides with their quick passing game.

Austria beat them 5-0. Their own passing game far superior and marked a run of games that saw 10 wins and two draws in their next 12 fixtures, scoring 49 goals in the process.

The birth of the Wunderteam. "It was refreshing to witness a triumph that sprang from true artistry," wrote the Austrian Arbeiter-Zeitung newspaper. "This was ultimately a tribute to Viennese aesthetic sense, imagination and passion." And Sindelar was the spearhead to the attack.

The Wunderteam dominated world football, but it was after Sindelar's last representative match when his life becomes controversial.

His last appearance, a "Reconciliation Match" between an Ostmark XI and Germany, after Austria had been annexed, saw Sindelar - allegedly - miss a number of first-half chances by purposefully placing the ball inches wide of the post.

Myth has it that the now 35 year old was under Nazi instruction not to score against the Germans. However, in the second half he duly tucked away a rebound to aid in an Ostmark win.

Some say this was the reasoning behind his death.

Sindelar retired in the following months and in August 1938, bought a cafe for a very credible DM20,000 off a Jew who had been forced to give it up under new legislation.

The following new year, on the morning of January 23 1939, his friend, Gustav Hartmann, was looking for Sindelar. Upon breaking into the cafe, Hartmann found Austria's greatest centre forward dead and naked on the floor next to his girlfriend of 10 days.

The girlfriend, Camilla Castignola, later died in hospital as a consequence of the same condition as Sindelar; asphyxiation from carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty heater.

Or at least that is what the police said, as they ended their investigation after two days. The public prosecution, however, had not reached a conclusion six months later when Nazi authorities ordered the case to be closed.

A BBC documentary revealed Egon Ulbrich, a friend of Sindelar's, saying how a local official was bribed to record his death as an accident so that he could have a state funeral.

Though it could just have easily been an accident, neighbours complained a few days earlier that one of the chimneys were faulty.

Believe what you want to believe. Football historian Jonathan Wilson sums things up beautifully:

"The available evidence suggests that Sindelar's death was an accident, and yet the sense that heroes cannot mundanely die prevailed. What, after all, at least to a romantic liberal mind, could better symbolise Austria at the point of the Anschluss than this athlete-artist, the darling of Viennese society, being gassed alongside his Jewish girlfriend?"

Answer: nothing.