“I was held in one of the roughest prisons in Singapore for 101 days. There were no beds or proper toilets. I was in cells with rapists and murderers. I was punched and beaten up every day. My nose was broken twice. I needed stitches for my eyes, my armpits and my chin. They tried to rape me.
“After two weeks, one guy tried to help me out. He said, ‘You have to fight back, or it will never stop.’ I was never a fighter before, but for the next 10 days I beat the s**t out of anyone who crossed me. I was so angry. Eventually, they began to leave me be. The worst thing was, I hadn’t even committed a crime.”
It may sound like the storyline to an unlikely Shawshank Redemption sequel, but it was a terrifying reality for Lutz Pfannenstiel. They’d form a remarkable anecdote for anybody to recount, but for Pfannenstiel, the experience is just a small part of an incredible life story. It’s a tale that includes him lying dead on the pitch for three minutes, being pelted with stones by angry mobs, comas, post-apartheid Johannesburg, business collapses, fast cars, faster women, court cases and trance music.
Oh, and did we mention the football? Pfannenstiel played quite a lot of it – in all, more than 400 games at 25 different clubs. In fact, the German goalkeeper became the first man on the planet to have plied his trade professionally across the six different FIFA continents – from Armenia to Albania, Bavaria to Brazil, New Zealand and Namibia to Norway and Nottingham. Not to mention a suitably bonkers spell with the Crazy Gang of Wimbledon.
“I’ve never stopped anywhere long enough to buy a house,” he told FFT. “But at some point I may buy a tour bus.” Apt for one of the most rock ’n’ roll football adventures ever told.
“HELLO, C**TS”
It may seem like Pfannenstiel decided to throw darts blindfolded into a world map for his career path, but it was never planned that way. Born in Bavaria in 1973, he was a talented young stopper who dreamed of keeping goal at the Maracana one day. Developed by his hometown club, Bad Kotzting, he won caps for Germany’s junior sides. Bayern Munich offered Pfannenstiel a contract aged 18, but he had other ideas. “I was obsessed with playing and didn’t fancy sitting on the bench,” he said. “Then a scout asked me if I wanted to sign for Penang. They offered me $5,000 and a car, which was decent. I thought I’d get some experience out there and then return to Europe.”
In Malaysia, he played in front of up to 40,000 fans, and at night doubled as a techno DJ on the Kuala Lumpur club scene. “I was a s**tty DJ, but I had the top records from Germany three months ahead of everyone else,” he laughed. “I’d just jump around like a lunatic.
“I liked new languages, religions and traditions – even if I was just a boy. But the football was average, and in 1994 Wimbledon came in for me. I would have gone anywhere in England. It’s a special football country for me.”
“I WAS A S**TY DJ, BUT I’D GET THE TOP RECORDS FROM GERMANY MONTHS BEFORE EVERYONE ELSE”
Joe Kinnear and Terry Burton had heard about the youngster via a scout, but if Penang had been an eye-opener, nothing could prepare him for the Crazy Gang. “It was a big surprise,” he said. “I went to training in Roehampton Park and imagined that England would have high-quality facilities. But we were in a park with two shacks, and two old ladies dishing out baked beans every morning! I signed a week-to-week deal anyway, lived in Kilburn, played in the reserves and made enough to just survive.”
Inevitably, he became victim to some Dons madness. “Gary Blissett and Mick Harford became good friends,” he said. “They took me out drinking once and I nearly died, so I didn’t drink again after that! I didn’t speak good English either, and the lads became my teachers. All they ever said was “f**king hell” and “stupid c**t”. I sounded like a gangster because I copied them. “Once we went for a meal and two girls were looking over at me. Gary told me that English girls loved polite foreigners, so to go over and say, “Hello, I’m Lutz from Germany, you little c**ts.” I said, “What does it mean?” They told me it meant “darling”.
“So I went over and said, “Hello, c**ts!” The girls nearly choked on their cake. But they realised I’d been tricked and told Gary off. “Another time I bought some nice shoes, but the dressing room was very dirty so I put them on the bench. The boys didn’t like that and when I got back in, they’d nailed my shoes to the bench. I went home barefoot. The shoes are probably still there now.”
Pfannenstiel didn’t make it into the first team at Wimbledon, but after a blinding display against Nottingham Forest’s reserves, found himself at the City Ground. “I thought I had a chance of ousting Mark Crossley, but the coach didn’t fancy me, so I went out on loan to South Africa,” he said.
He moved to Johannesburg-based Orlando Pirates, right after the end of apartheid and with the country still a political tinderbox. “It was very tense,” he remembered. “People were vicious to each other. Black and white were in different corners. It was very difficult, because the whole team was black and they really disliked me. But once they realised I was European and liberal, it got better. I enjoyed playing and the crowds were amazing.”
Pfannenstiel defied advice not to go out in the city’s lethal townships. “I was in a hotel in Hillbrow, the most criminal part of the city,” he said. “They told me, ‘Don’t leave or you’ll get shot.’ But after a week I was bored and thought, ‘Screw it.’ People knew me from the team and I ended up being OK. That gave me a nose for danger.” Come the end of the season, he was bound for very different climes: Finland. “I played for TPV and Haka, and it was nice, though very cold,” he said. “Finnish people are also difficult to get to know, until they get drunk, at which point they start telling you stuff you don’t want to hear. The language is also impossible – I can count to three and say a couple of swear words, that’s about it.”
With the Finns unable to meet his financial demands, Pfannenstiel ended up playing with Wacker Burghausen in the German third tier, but found himself no longer feeling at home. In 2000, an offer came in from Geylang United in Singapore. It was a move that would change his life forever.
Geylang were one of the biggest clubs in Singapore and Pfannenstiel was thrust straight into the first XI, and with it local superstardom. As well as being picked up to model for Armani Exchange, he started doing media work, analysing Premier League games for Singaporean TV and ESPN.
“I’d gone from zero to 100 in a few weeks,” he recalled. “I was playing in front of lots of fans and living like some kind of royalty. They party until they drop in Singapore. I was going mad with the cars and the girls – living it large. It was a huge high, but then everything came crashing down.”
JAILED FOR WINNING
Pfannenstiel’s nightmare began when he was approached by an Indian man at a petrol station. The man, recognising Pfannenstiel, asked the goalkeeper how he thought Geylang would do in their next game. “I said, ‘We’re in good shape, we’re going to win!’” the German replied. “It was an everyday conversation.” Two weeks later, the same man approached him while he was eating at a restaurant with friends. They spoke again about the coming weekend’s game. “I said, ‘We’re going to murder them!’ and that was that,” he recalled. A third meeting in a shopping centre also took place, where Pfannenstiel – accompanied by his girlfriend – told the same man that he believed his team would triumph once more. “I never saw the guy again,” he said.
Corruption was rife in the Singaporean football scene at the time, though, and a widespread clampdown was taking place. One Sunday, as he was watching TV with Australian footballer Mirko Jurilj, his peace was rudely disturbed. “The doorbell went and my friend opened the door,” he recalled. “A fist knocked him to the floor. It was four guys and they smashed up my whole house. They were corruption police – a rough unit. It was like something from a film. I said, ‘Guys, what are you looking for?’ They replied, ‘Money and betting slips.’ I said, ‘My money is in the bank, and I don’t bet.’ I even joked, ‘You’ve forgotten to break my lamp – maybe there’s a million pounds in it!’ So they smashed that, too. They found nothing.”
The laughter soon stopped. The pair were arrested, held for 48 hours with no lawyer and tortured, Pfannenstiel claimed. “I was being interrogated like a hardened criminal,” he said. “I was slapped, put naked into a cold cell, they tried to break my fingers. They asked me the same s**t and I just denied it. “Then the Indian guy appeared. I confirmed I’d met him and I signed a statement. The policeman said, ‘You’re going to prison.’ I said, ‘Listen up, mother f**ker, if you jail me for this, you must be a world champion. I’ve done nothing.’”
“THE PHYSIO BROUGHT ME BACK TO LIFE THREE TIMES AND THE DOCTOR THOUGHT I MIGHT BE HANDICAPPED”
Released from custody, he carried on playing for Geylang – keeping seven clean sheets in the season’s final eight games. By that point, Pfannenstiel thought the scandal had blown over, but after the last match of the season, was told to report back to the police. He was handcuffed and told he was being charged with making a ‘verbal corrupt agreement’.
“This crime doesn’t even exist,” said Pfannenstiel. “The bookie said that I’d agreed to share his bonus if we won games. It was my word against his. But how could I be corrupt by trying to win a game, anyway? I always try to win!”
At trial, numerous witnesses spoke in his favour, while the prosecution just had the bookmaker. Yet Pfannenstiel was found guilty, the judge concluding that he had deliberately played better than usual in the games discussed. “It was even proven in court that no money changed hands,” he said. But he was sent away to the country’s fearsome Queenstown Remand Prison.
“When you’re fighting someone who has been given the death penalty, they don’t have much to lose,” he said. “I stepped over my shadow and learned how to fight. People were dying in there. It’s the worst place on the planet.”
“I WAS DEAD”
Pfannenstiel was finally released after passing a lie detector test and headed home. His ordeal was over. He’d lost 16kg of weight and was in a mentally fragile state. “I had the biggest party ever when I got out,” he said. “But I was carrying around a prison mentality. Every time someone looked at me, I felt like knocking them out. I threatened this guy at a beer festival. I had to get myself in check. I scared people.”
He moved to Bradford with his English girlfriend. “I liked Yorkshire,” he said. “I had a week-to-week contract with Huddersfield, and Lou Macari and Joe Jordan helped me a lot. I never told them about prison, but they knew.
“All I wanted was a chance to do my studies in sports and tourism management quietly, and play a little football. So I flew 48 hours straight for the trial. Manchester to London, London to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Auckland, and Auckland to Dunedin. I slept for two hours, then went to the club. “At the trial, they hit shots at me for 40 minutes and I was on f**king fire. The chairman was open-mouthed and I said to him, ‘You decide what to pay me.’ I slept for 24 hours, then the next day they made me the best-paid player in the club’s history, as well as one of the best in the league.”
Pfannenstiel would play in New Zealand’s league for five months a year for the next five years, while spending the rest of the time out on loan. But there was more drama to come. During a spell back in non-league with Bradford Park Avenue, he was involved in a nasty collision with Harrogate Town’s Clayton Donaldson. His lung collapsed and his heart stopped beating for three minutes.
“In England, it takes a nuclear war to stop a game, but they stopped it after that challenge!” he said. “I was dead. I had no pulse. The physio brought me back to life three times. I was in a coma for a few hours and the doctor thought I might be mentally handicapped. “But then I woke up. Everything was a blur. I thought I was still playing, and I started shouting at the nurses, ‘Get me the f**k out of here, we’re winning 2-1!’ “The nurse told me that the game had stopped. I was fuming. I tried to move, but couldn’t. I thought I was paralysed, but was tied down. I told them, ‘Cut me off this bloody board’, then got up and walked home. But I couldn’t breathe, so I got driven back to the hospital.”
BIGGER THAN THE BIBLE
Ten days later after defying death, Pfannenstiel played again. Inevitably, he was soon back on tour. He played with Baerum in Norway (“peaceful”), for Calgary Mustangs (“they went bust while I was there”), Vancouver Whitecaps (“professional, and a lovely city”), in Albania with Vllaznia Shkoder, where away fans pelted him with rocks and fireworks (“they’re passionate”), and for Armenia’s Bentonit Ijevan. He also returned to New Zealand with Otago United, where he took home a penguin and kept it in his bathtub.
But it was a call from his agent that finally helped him achieve a personal dream. “He said to me, ‘Lutz, you’ve played on five different continents, how do you fancy making it six and going to Brazil with Atletico Ibirama?’” Pfannenstiel recalled. “It took me back to my childhood dream. The next thing I knew it was sunshine, beautiful people and football as a religion.”
He also finally got to don his gloves at the Maracana. “I’d been searching for something all my life, and it felt like that was it,” he said. “I smiled for the whole 90 minutes. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel restless.”
Spells at Floy and Manglerud Star in Norway, plus Namibian side Ramblers, brought Pfannenstiel’s playing career to an end. “I’d been the goalkeeping coach of Cuba,” he said. “Then I was a sports director in Norway, coached Ramblers and was assistant coach of Namibia.”
During the 2010 World Cup, he appeared alongside Oliver Kahn as a pundit on German TV, before becoming director of international relations and scouting for Hoffenheim in the Bundesliga. “It’s easy for me to scout, because I know people all over the world!” he laughed. “My phone book is bigger than the Bible. I’m the ultimate example of football’s globalisation. When I did well in weaker leagues, my ambitions meant I tried to better myself by taking new opportunities. And sometimes, like in England, I wasn’t quite good enough to make it, so I moved on. Circumstances just keep me moving.”
You get the impression that once he’d started globe-trotting, however, there was no stopping him – towards the end, his itinerant lifestyle became a USP and something he cashed in on, writing a book about his adventures.
Pfannenstiel learned some major life lessons along the way. Travel gave him a lot. “I have more air miles than any other person in the world, and I should be in the book of records for packing suitcases,” he said, before revealing an ambition to tick off the last remaining continent and play a charity match in Antarctica. Plenty of penguins there. Not so many bathtubs.
This article first appeared in the August 2011 edition of FourFourTwo magazine