The Mystery of Matthias Sindelar, Part One
It Was What It Was : The Football History Podcast
The Overlap
4.9 • 667 Ratings
🗓️ 28 January 2025
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome back to It Was What It Was, the football history podcast.
Austrian footballer Matthias Sindelar was one of the greats of the game but his mysterious death in 1939 at the age of just 35 became a hugely contested issue in the darkest era of Austrian history. Was he murdered because he objected to the Nazis? Did he chose to end his life unable to countenance living under Hitler? Or was he the victim of a tragic accident? And what role had his girlfriend Camilla Castagnola, found dead alongside him, played?
Join Jonathan and Rob as they separate fact from fiction in the life of a lesser known great….
Our finale is out on Friday!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | He would play football as a grandmaster plays chess, with a broad mental conception, |
| 0:12.0 | calculating moves and counter moves in advance, always choosing the most promising of all possibilities. |
| 0:18.9 | He was an unequal trapper of the ball and a stage of surprise |
| 0:22.7 | counter-attacks, inexhaustibly devised in tactical feints, which were followed by true |
| 0:28.2 | attacking moves such as deception had made irresistible, the opponents having been cunningly |
| 0:33.4 | fooled by a flash of skill. Well, welcome to it was what it was. I'm Rob Draper. I'm here with |
| 0:39.8 | Jonathan Wilson and that was Alfred Polga writing the obituary of Matthias Sindler in Paris |
| 0:46.5 | Targish siton in January 1939. Mathias Sindler may not be a play you've heard of, but he is one of the great of Austrian football. |
| 0:56.5 | And his story, I think, is one of the most intriguing and fascinating of that period of the 1930s, |
| 1:03.9 | because the backdrop of the politics and the rise of Nazism in Germany and Austria makes it so compelling. |
| 1:10.8 | And Jonathan, we're going to do a few episodes, I think, on how football played out |
| 1:16.4 | under the Nazis, which in itself is a fascinating topic. |
| 1:19.4 | And this really is a taste for this and just such an intriguing and tragic story. |
| 1:26.9 | Yeah, I mean, Cinderlo, I think, is probably the greatest |
| 1:29.9 | Austrian player of all time. The only player you could challenge him really is then Stockbrook in |
| 1:34.0 | in the years just after the war. But I think really, Sindler is the great Austrian player of all |
| 1:39.1 | time. And he dies at the age of 35. To this day, what actually happened is not clear. |
| 1:47.1 | So what we're going to try and do over these next two episodes |
| 1:49.8 | is try and work out what did happen. |
| 1:52.5 | How did this great centre forward die at the age of 35 in Vienna in January 1939? |
| 1:59.2 | So less than a year after the Anschluss and I think |
| 2:04.4 | when when people start to read about football history what I think one of the things that a lot of |
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