When Uwe Seeler played one match in the League of Ireland by accident

The death of former West Germany striker Uwe Seeler calls to mind the unusual story of how he played a league match in Ireland by accident.

As professional footballers go, few have ever been loved in Germany in quite the way Uwe Seeler was. At club level, Seeler terrorised German club defences for Hamburger SV for almost two decades, and also featured in four World Cups for West Germany between 1958 and 1970, including captaining them against England in the 1966 final and scoring one of the goals that knocked them out in Mexico four years later. At the time of his international retirement in 1970, his 72 caps were a record. Two years after his retirement, he became the second former captain to be made an honorary captain of the team by the DFB after Fritz Walter, who led their 1954 World Cup-winning team.

In the club game, Seeler came to be known as an icon of one-club loyalty. He scored 406 league goals in 478 appearance for Hamburg, and refused temptingly lucrative offers to leave the club and try his luck elsewhere, even though they were not a particularly successful side at the time. The sum total of his medal tally for all those years there was two: a German football championship in 1960 and a DFB-Pokal three years later. But the big money offers never seemed to sway a player whose modest lifestyle was well-known and who became known as ‘Uns Uwe’ – ‘Our Uwe’ – while he was playing.

When Inter, who were building what would become the most successful club side in the Europe over the first half of the 1960s, came calling for him in 1961, they mistook his lack of desire to leave Hamburg as him attempting to negotiate a better deal. But the reality of the situation was that Seeler simply didn’t want to go. He never did