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Andreas ZassenFootball player
Date of Birth: 14.01.1968
Country:  Germany |
Content:
- Biography of Andreas Zassen
- Early Career
- Struggles and Controversies
- Andreas Zassen played 79 matches for teams in the first Bundesliga.
Biography of Andreas Zassen
Andreas Zassen, a football player, died long before his fortieth birthday. In this article, we will discuss the footballer and the reasons for his early death. Zassen passed away on a Sunday in one of the clinics in Essen at the age of 36. In recent years, there had been no news about this footballer, who suffered from chronic alcoholism, hence the information about his death leaked to the German press with delay.
Early Career
Andreas Zassen was born on January 14, 1968, in Essen. In the early 1980s, he was considered one of the most talented football players in West Germany and was selected for the youth national teams. He signed his first professional contract with the team "Rot-Weiss" from his hometown, Essen. He later played for "Bayer" from Jüdingen, and in the summer of 1993, he joined the first Bundesliga club, "Hamburg". However, the talented midfielder soon encountered serious problems with discipline.
Struggles and Controversies
While playing for "Hamburg", Zassen often showed up for training with the smell of alcohol, and reports of his drinking habits regularly made it to the newspapers. In the winter of 1993, he was arrested by the traffic police for drunk driving. Zassen's breathalyzer test revealed a blood alcohol level of 1.6 per mille. The footballer had to pay a fine of 12,500 marks.
In the summer of 1994, "Hamburg" terminated Zassen's contract, and he moved to "Dynamo" in Dresden, but things didn't improve for him there either. He did not make it into the "Dynamo" squad, but soon the footballer, who had already earned the nickname "Vodka-Zassen", found a way out. He embarked on an adventure that no German-born footballer had dared before. He signed a contract with a team from the former USSR, Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk. No German player had ever been a part of the Soviet football before, except for Soviet Germans such as Edgar Hess, Peter Neustatter, or Vladimir Nidergaus.
Of course, he didn't end up there by chance. In 1994, Dnipro appointed the German specialist Bernd Stange, which was also an unprecedented experiment at that time. Stange had previously coached the East German national team but had been unemployed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, working with semi-amateur teams in the eastern states. Taking charge of Dnipro, Stange remembered Zassen. In Dnipropetrovsk, Zassen continued to indulge in alcoholic beverages and easily adapted to the Ukrainian reality. Vladimir Gorily, a teammate at Dnipro, described the first German legionnaire in the history of post-Soviet football in one of his interviews: "Andreas Zassen doesn't look like a German at all. He used to say, 'I was meant to be born in this country.' He was a simple guy, often late, and never refused a drink."
Stange worked in Dnipropetrovsk for a year before he had to leave his post. Later, this specialist resurfaced in Iraq, where he worked with the national team. Zassen, however, who did not stand out in any particular way in Dnipropetrovsk, had to return to his homeland. In Germany, he managed to sign a contract with the second division club, "Wattenscheid". But, as soon as he went on the first training camp with his new team in Portugal, Zassen got involved in a scandal. He started a romance with a Dutch bartender, which Petra, Zassen's wife, found out about. This was the final straw for Petra, and she announced that she was leaving Andreas, even though their child was only nine weeks old at the time.
Zassen, who did not break into the main squad of "Wattenscheid", continued his downward spiral. In August 1997, he was arrested by the police for causing trouble in one of the bars in Essen: the intoxicated Zassen threatened the visitors with a gas pistol.
With his football career over before he turned thirty, Zassen found a minor job as a municipal employee in Essen, a suburb close to Wattenscheid. He lived the life of an ordinary German citizen in his final days, but he didn't quit drinking, which indirectly led to his death.
On Sunday, when the son of Zassen's partner came home, he found the former footballer lying on the floor. Zassen had suffered a stroke. He was taken to one of the clinics in Essen, where he passed away. Dirk Krumpelmann, a reporter for the German newspaper "Bild" who used to be a professional footballer and played with Zassen for Jüdingen's "Bayer", remembered him as follows: "Andreas had the potential to be a brilliant footballer. But when he came to training, you could feel that he had a wild night before..."
