Eintracht Frankfurt will meet again this Wednesday with Real Madrid, 62 years after having played and lost a legendary European Cup final against the white team that they continue to represent, despite a resounding 7-3, one of the club’s myths German.
Since then a lot has also happened and part of the adventures of the German team have had more to do with the daily hardships of the fight against relegation, or the fight to return to the first category, than with the top of the European stage.
The triumph in the Europa League last season, against all odds, is seen as the most important success for Eintracht, which in its entire history has been German champion once, in 1959, which allowed it to play the European Cup in the who ended up losing the final against Madrid.
Those were times when German football was only semi-professional, which, for the players at the time, made this game even more important. “For us they were gods dressed in white, if one of them had asked me to carry his briefcase, I would not have hesitated to do so,” former striker Erwin Stein often repeats what has been repeated insistently these days.
“It was a professional match against players who trained in the afternoons after work”, recalled former player Dieter Stinka, quoted by the newspaper “Fránfurter Allgemeine”.
Currently, in the Eintracht museum, there is the ball from that final with the autographs of the Real Madrid players that Richard Kress collected at the banquet after the match. After the final whistle he had seized the ball.
The ball was only delivered to the Eintracht museum in 2006 ten years after Kress’s death by his widow.
After that historic night in Glasgow, Eintracht’s history has been full of ups and downs.
In 1963 it was among the founding clubs of the Bundesliga, which began the full professionalization of German football. In 1974 there were two Eintracht players, Jürgen Grabowski and Bernd Holzenbein, in the world champion German team.
In 1989 he won the UEFA Cup. In the early 1990s, Eintracht was one of the best teams in Germany. The team of the 1991/1992 season, the one that had two world champions who were Andreas Möller and Uwe Bein, is considered the best Eintracht of all time. But the German title escaped him on the last day, losing to Hansa Rostock whose relegation was sealed. The champion was Stuttgart.
In 1993/1994, in the first round, they were five points ahead of second place Bayern. But in the second round he only reached 14 points and finished fifth. Then a deep crisis began. In 96 came the descent. In 1998 he rose again, after two seasons in the second category.
In 2001 it fell again. In the previous seasons everything had been marked by the fight for permanence.
Then came two years in which even the existence of Eintracht was threatened by irregularities. The team was also on the verge of relegation to the third category.
In 2003 after having been close to relegation in 2002, Eintracht managed to rise again to the first Bundesliga. In 2004 it went down again which showed that it was on the verge of becoming what is usually called an elevator team.
As of 2012, however, the team has stabilized and has managed to remain uninterrupted in the first category. In 2018 he won the German Cup, which he had already won four other times.
The most important thing, however, was the victory in the Europa League in 2022, even if that happened just in a season in the Bundesliga clearly below expectations.
In any case, the reunion with Madrid comes after Eintracht went through what can be considered the slums of football to return to being at least close to the top.
Madrid has another story. Perhaps they continue to see them as gods in white, although it is doubtful that anyone is willing to carry the briefcase.
