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Dream Team

Walther Bensemann


Walther Bensemann, German football pioneer and founder of the sports magazine Kicker, was at home throughout Europe. Born in Berlin in 1873 as the son of a Jewish banker’s family, Bensemann was sent to a Swiss private school at the age of ten.

It was here he first came into contact with football, which was almost unknown in Germany. In 1889 he changed to a grammar school in Karlsruhe and quickly became a football missionary in southern Germany. In the International Footballclub and later German champions FV Karlsruhe he founded the first clubs in southern Germany and helped to set up the clubs that later developed into Eintracht Frankfurt and Bayern Munich.

He also organised the first international games and became the first person to invite an English team to play on the continent. As a convinced cosmopolitan he strived to overcome the rifts between nations through sport. He worked as a language and sports teacher in Switzerland and then spent 13 years in the United Kingdom before being forced back by World War I.

In 1920 he founded Kicker, a magazine he regarded as a “symbol of understanding between nations through sport”. This internationalism was in conflict with the top brass in the German Football Association (DFB) and made him an outsider. In the European countries he visited almost continuously between 1920 and 1933, however, he enjoyed more respect than the often arrogant officials of the German FA. In 1933 he was forced to abandon his life’s work, Kicker, due to the persecution of the Jews and emigrated to Switzerland where he died, in poverty and reliant on the charity of friends, in November 1934.