The endurance runner: Obituary for the Cologne club legend Heinz Simmet

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Heinz Simmet cheers with his Cologne team

Photo: Werek / IMAGO

Heinz Simmet always played. Anyone who watched Bundesliga football in the 1970s couldn't ignore him. He played 259 Bundesliga games in a row for 1. FC Köln between 1970 and 1977, an incredible level of consistency, no other Bundesliga player in all the long decades of football has achieved this.

Simmet was never sick, rarely injured, and when he was, he still played. Mister Reliable, in the Rhineland a hard-working man is called a hard worker. Heinz Simmet was a hard worker. He was like the bunny from the Duracell commercial. When everyone else ran out of batteries, Heinz Simmet just kept going. Simmet died on Wednesday at the age of 79. Cologne is in mourning.

From the Saarland to the Rhineland

The man with the subtle mustache actually came from Saarland, but he became a club icon in the Rhineland. A path that Jonas Hector also took in a similar way many years later. Saarland is good ground for FC legends.

Heinz Simmet represented perhaps 1. FC Köln's best Bundesliga season. It's hard to imagine these days, but FC was once a top club, born for the top group of the league; in the late 1970s it was much bigger than FC Bayern. This is even harder to imagine.

Overath, Flohe and the others

The Rhinelander is often said to have been built close to the water, but naming Cologne's regular team at the time can bring tears of emotion to the faces of even die-hard FC fans. The leaders Wolfgang Overath and Hennes Löhr, Heinz Flohe, the casual midfield genius, Herbert Neumann, the young star at the time, the feared defensive edges Bernd Cullmann and Herbert Konopka, the veteran Wolfgang Weber, the tall Gerd Strack, the Belgian millionaire Roger van Gool , goal scorer Dieter Müller and Toni Schumacher in the goal, chewing gum at the back. Each of them deserves a monument.

In the middle of it all, the worker Heinz Simmet was running and toiling, inconspicuous, but always there. Indispensable, no matter which head coach was in charge around the Geißbockheim: Simmet experienced nine coaches in his eleven years in Cologne from 1967 to 1978. There were all different types from Willi, called Fischken, Multhaup, very old school, to Tschick Cajkovski, the rascal, right up to Hennes Weisweiler, the Spiritus Rector of German football. They all knew what they had in Heinz Simmet.

Almost became a Gladbacher

Simmet was one of the quiet representatives in the rather noisy city of Cologne; he was sometimes called Overath's chain dog, which was meant as a compliment. He did the dirty work and the stars were allowed to shine. Every Wolfgang Overath needs his Heinz Simmet.

The man almost didn't end up in Cologne, but rather at arch-rival Borussia Mönchengladbach. To ensure that this did not happen, FC President Franz Cremer specifically invited the 1954 world champion, Hans Schäfer, to the contract negotiations. The big name was supposed to impress Simmet, and that probably worked. Simmet, previously active on the ground floor of the Bundesliga for Borussia Neunkirchen and Rot Weiss Essen, signed in Cologne and the golden times began.

In his first year in Cologne he won the DFB Cup with FC with a 3-1 final victory over VfL Bochum, five years later he was on the field in the cup final against Mönchengladbach, which is still unforgettable today and which Borussia defeated through Günter Netzer in the Extra time was won, including the superstar's own substitution.

The Gladbachers were also the big competitors in Simmet's last year, when FC had the upper hand in the shooting competition with their rivals on the very last matchday, when the goal difference decided the German championship: Cologne won 5-0 at FC St. Pauli, as they took advantage The Gladbachers also lost their 12-0 win against Borussia Dortmund in the parallel game. The team also won the DFB Cup; 1978 was the double year; FC had never been more successful.

Farewell with championship and cup victory

For Simmet it's a perfect ending, you should go when it's most beautiful. The bones that he had held for Cologne for a decade were no longer taking part. In his farewell season he actually missed eleven games due to injury, something that would never have happened to the former Simmet. Then he knew: It was time to stop. After 419 Bundesliga games. After 60 European Cup appearances and 55 DFB Cup games.

In his hometown, Göttelborn in Saarland, population 2,275, they have named a street after him, the Heinz-Simmet-Weg, which of course leads to the SV Germania Göttelborn sports field, where Simmet learned to play football.

In the megacity of Cologne, he himself made sure that people remembered his name even after his professional career: the delivery vans of his painting company with the inscription “Heinz Simmet Malerwerkstätten GmbH” were part of the street scene for years. He trained as a master painter with his brother. Before that, as a professional, he did everything he could to ensure that the future of 1. FC Köln shone in the rosiest of colors.

It was really no longer his fault that the paint was off at FC at some point.