In 1974, a lightning-fast right-winger caught the eye of a Barcelona scout and was immediately offered a contract. His impact in Europe would be telling, but it's likely you've never heard of him.
Regular readers may be aware that over the past 12 years I've often tried to devote the last column before Christmas to a special subject. This year it's a player who meant a lot to me when I was a kid.
I'm fairly sure that the vast majority of you have never heard of Kai Falke, even though no less an authority than Joan Laporta, Barcelona's president from 2003 to 2010, once called him "one of the best signings in Barca's history" and the Catalan historian Dr. Ramon Usall has written an entire book about the role he played for Barcelona and for Catalan identity.
You may wonder why this man qualifies as the subject for a column that is meant to deal with aspects of German football. Well, there are two reasons. The first is that Falke's nationality was not easily definable, not least because he never played for a national team. In all likelihood, he was French, but you could say he had German roots, too.
Which leads us to the second reason. Falke first made a name for himself in Germany, more precisely in Dusseldorf during June and July of 1974. At that time, he wasn't a professional player but worked as a graphic designer in the advertising department of a big food company called ZDFI.
While attending a game between Fortuna Dusseldorf and Bayern Munich he accidentally met Bruno Leidel, then working as a scout for Barcelona. He told Leidel that he played football himself, as the player-manager for ZDFI's company team.
Leidel then watched this team take on a strong amateur side called Kickers. Falke scored a hat trick as the ZDFI team came from behind to win 3-2 and Leidel immediately offered him a three-year contract with Barcelona.
To be honest, I hardly remember these beginnings of Falke's career, as I was only 8 years old at the time. But I knew about the Dusseldorf angle and was able to research it. Most other fans of the player have never heard of his pre-Barcelona career and assume he suddenly emerged, as if coming from nowhere, as a fully-fledged star five years later, in 1979.
That was the year the player, a lightning-fast right-winger, led Barcelona to a famous first-round win against Cologne in Europe and then also past Kevin Keegan's Hamburg, even though he initially didn't get along with the hot-headed Yugoslav Stefan Stanovic, recently signed from OGC Nice. Eventually, though, the two became best buddies and were the key men in a Barca side soon taken over by the British coach C.B. Kerr, a firm but fair redhead with a crew cut and a moustache.
By all accounts, Kerr was a good man-manager, but no tactical wizard. He coached the team to a European quarterfinal victory over Dinamo Bucuresti, but when Barcelona met Nantes in the semifinals, the French coach informed his team that "Kerr is not too keen on strategic finesse." He was proved right, as Nantes knocked out the Catalans on away goals.
In the next European season, Barcelona eliminated Monaco and reached the semifinals again, this time against Bayern Munich. But in the build-up to the game, rumours began making the rounds that Falke had an offer from Paris Saint-Germain. And indeed, after a meeting with PSG's president, Francis Borelli, Barca's right-winger decided to leave Catalonia.
He scored the deciding goal in the second leg against Bayern to see Barcelona through to the final. After the game, he was given a moving farewell. The crowd chanted his name and the club president called him "one of the great players who helped increase Barcelona's prestige."
Well, you know what happened next, right? In the other semifinal, PSG defeated Inter Milan and reached the two-legged final -- against Barcelona. The Catalans won the first leg at Camp Nou 3-2 and were only one step away from avenging the previous season's heartbreaking exit. But now they were without their iconic No. 7. And of course none other than Falke scored a brace in the return leg to win the trophy for his new club.
However, somehow Barca were always the player's true love. Although he did well in Paris, he went back to Catalonia in 1985. And not before time. Barcelona had signed the eminently talented but also obstinate and volatile Argentine striker Enrico Nervi from Boca Juniors and Kerr just couldn't get through to him.
You could say Barcelona's entire season turned on a bizarre off-the-pitch event. Nervi and Falke were taken hostage by three bank robbers and managed to escape together. It created a bond between the two and suddenly the Argentine was a different player -- his master class against Cologne saw Barcelona through to the European semis yet again.
At the end of that season, Barca finally won the European trophy that had eluded them for so long, in the final against Girondins de Bordeaux on penalties. Of course the deciding spot kick was converted by Barcelona's prodigal son, their famous No. 7.
It was probably the high point of the player's career. A year later, Barcelona were knocked out by Lille OSC, also on penalties. Shortly after the game the player announced that he would again leave Barcelona and join, well, Lille.
He had a great start at his new club, scoring in a home win over Nantes. However, his first game for Lille was also his last ever. By 1992, it was all over. The player's right-footed strike on 67 minutes which made it 2-0 against Nantes was the last we saw of him.
Why? I don't really know. I suppose Raymond Reding, then 72 years old, had lost interest or vigour or both. In any case, he wasn't accountable to anybody. Reding had invented and created the player all those years ago, so he had every right to bury him.
Reding, the son of French mother and a Belgian father, was an illustrator and comic strip artist. Starting in the 1950s, he worked for two of the most famous comics magazines in the world, the Franco-Belgian publications Tintin and Spirou. He specialised in sports comics. His best known series was probably "Jari," starring tennis player Jimmy Torrent. In 1963, Reding created his first football player, Vincent Larcher.
Larcher was somewhat unusual for Reding, because the artist's sports stories were normally highly realistic and devoid of the sort of sensationalist elements that formed a staple of the "Roy of the Rovers" tales. But "Larcher" quickly became an adventure series with fantasy elements, peopled by mad scientists and superheroes.
Still, when the German comics magazine Zack felt that 1974, the year of the World Cup in Germany, called for a football story, Reding was the man they went to. The character he created for the weekly was called Kai Falke.
Various Internet sources claim that the player's initial name was Max Falk, but this is wrong. He was called Kai Falke on the day he first appeared, which was June 6, 1974. But in the following year, the Zack story, originally published in five parts, came out as a comic book entitled "De held van de grasmat" (The Hero of the Pitch) in the Netherlands, and for this one-off edition the player's name became Max Falk.
As was his wont, Reding's Kai Falke illustrations were amazingly close to life -- his rendering of Dusseldorf's stadium and the match details of the Fortuna vs. Bayern game are lovingly accurate. But the far-fetched ending of the original story -- the amateur player signing for Barcelona -- would indicate that Reding felt this was just a commissioned work, not something he'd return to.
If so, he changed his mind five years later, perhaps feeling that a realistic football series held some promise and could appeal to kids as much as adults. He teamed up with the Belgian scenarist Francoise Hugues and revived Kai Falke in France under the name Eric Castel.
Maybe anticipating that some readers might dimly recall this character from a German magazine, Reding and Hugues opened the first new story with the clever twist that Castel signs for Barcelona -- for the second time.
A conversation between two local sports writers, watching Barca train from the stands, fills in the blanks for us: They talk about how Castel signed as an amateur some time ago but couldn't break into the team. (The throwaway line "It was the Cruyff era" suggests he may have been snubbed by King Johan.)
Castel then joined Inter, they say, but suffered a meniscus injury which sidelined him for quite a while. He was eventually re-signed by Barcelona because the club hoped he had now matured.
Well, he had. Eric Castel made the most of this new lease of life. The comic strip became very popular in France and Spain and was also published in Germany (where the name Kai Falke was used again) and the Netherlands (where the erstwhile Max Falk now became Ronnie Hansen).
As a football-mad 14-year-old, I devoured the first post-resurrection Kai Falke stories, published in Germany in 1980. I remember being deeply disappointed when the series was discontinued in this country only one year later -- after just four new stories -- due to the collapse of Zack magazine.
Elsewhere, though, Eric Castel lived on and became a cult hero. I wasn't joking when I said at the beginning that he had a book written about him. (It's called "Un món en blau i grana -- El Barça d'Eric Castel," which means: A World in Blue and Maroon: the Barca of Eric Castel.) And the Laporta quote is authentic, too.
"It'll amaze you the way FC Barcelona fans talk about Eric Castel as if he was a real player," the blog Inspire Football marvelled last year. The same piece quotes the French football agent Olivier Jouanneaux, who said about Castel's brief move to PSG: "As a French citizen, I was happy then, to see Castel in a French club. That was a big success for the French championship."
Which tells you they took him just as seriously in France, and probably also in the Benelux countries, perhaps because of the strip's almost report-like verisimilitude. And for a brief time I, too, wanted to be like Kai Falke, or at least have him play for my team.
But like I said, then Zack folded in the early 1980s, Kai Falke disappeared from German newsstands and I had to make do with real footballers. They were sometimes poor substitutes.
Merry Christmas or, as the honorary Catalan Eric Castel would've said: Bon Nadal!