Over the years, some very famous footballers have played for a spell in the League of Ireland with clubs enticing major stars of international football to spend brief periods of their later careers entertaining League of Ireland supporters.
In this series, Colm Murphy gives a rundown of some of the top “superstars” who “graced” the League of Ireland over the years.
Uwe Seeler
This certainly qualifies as one of the most bizarre stories in the history of the league. Uwe Seeler was one of the great legends of German football. He made his international debut in 1954 at the age of 18.
He went on to play in the 1958, 1962, 1966 and 1970 World Cups. He was the first player to score in four separate World Cup Finals (narrowly beating Pele) and is the only player to score two goals in separate World Cups Finals.
Only two players have played more minutes of World Cup Finals football than Uwe Seeler (Paulo Maldini and Lother Matthaus). H
e only ever played for one club, SV Hamburg, where he retired in 1972 at the age of 36 after 474 games and an incredible 404 goals.
So how the hell did he end up at Cork Celtic six years after his retirement?
Seeler was, by 1978, involved in many commercial aspects of football including working for Adidas. He was due to come to Ireland on business and Cork Celtic worked with a contact at Adidas to try and sign Seeler in time for their FAI Cup match with Dundalk.
This failed to materialise but he did eventually turn up to play against Shamrock Rovers on April 23rd 1978.
Six years since his last competitive match, Seeler scored two outstanding goals. Future Dundalk ‘keeper Alan O’Neill had no chance as Seeler blasted past him from 18-yards after 57 minutes.
Within two minutes, Seeler had the crowd on their feet when he scored a sensational bicycle kick from the edge of the area. Unfortunately for Celtic, Rovers were already 3-0 up by the time Seeler scored his first and, once the German legend had finished his cameo, scored three more times to win 6-2.
It appears that Seeler thought that the game was just a charity match and had no idea that it was a competitive fixture, but the two goals that he scored that day are counted in his all-time record of 509 goals. No other German player has since beaten that record.
