Max Paul Seeburg (19 September 1884 – 24 January 1972) was a German

footballer A football player or footballer is a sportsperson who plays one of the different types of football. The main types of football are association football, American football, Canadian football, Australian rules football, Gaelic football, rugby ...

who played in England for

Chelsea Chelsea or Chelsey may refer to: Places Australia * Chelsea, Victoria Canada * Chelsea, Nova Scotia * Chelsea, Quebec United Kingdom * Chelsea, London, an area of London, bounded to the south by the River Thames ** Chelsea (UK Parliament consti ...

Tottenham Hotspur Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, commonly referred to as Tottenham () or Spurs, is a professional football club based in Tottenham, London, England. It competes in the Premier League, the top flight of English football. The team has playe ...

Burnley Burnley () is a town and the administrative centre of the wider Borough of Burnley in Lancashire, England, with a 2001 population of 73,021. It is north of Manchester and east of Preston, Lancashire, Preston, at the confluence of the River C ...

Grimsby Town Grimsby Town Football Club is a professional football club based in Cleethorpes, North East Lincolnshire, England, that in the 2022–23 season will compete in , the fourth tier of the English football league system, following the victory in t ...

and

Reading Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of letters, symbols, etc., especially by sight or touch. For educators and researchers, reading is a multifaceted process involving such areas as word recognition, orthography (spelling ...

between 1906 and 1912. Seeburg became the first European-born foreigner to play in England.

Biography

Born in

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as ...

, Seeburg moved to London in 1886, at the age of two. His first professional club was

, who he joined in 1906. He did not play a competitive match for the West London side, and two years later moved across the city to join

. Seeburg's first and only league match for Tottenham was on 26 September 1908, in a 1–0 away defeat to

Hull City Hull City Association Football Club is a professional football club based in Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire, England, that compete in the . They have played home games at the MKM Stadium since moving from Boothferry Park in 2002. The club's t ...

in the Second Division. He moved to Leyton in the following month. After a season at Leyton, Seeburg left London and spent the 1910–11 season back in the Second Division with

. After a spell at

later that year, he joined

, where he retired in 1912. He settled and ran a pub in

. After a brief comeback in February 1914, he was briefly arrested a few weeks after the outbreak of the

First World War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

because of his German origins, he had not been naturalized, and sent to an internment camp in Newbury. Because of his good relations with the local authorities, he was released after about a week, but had lost his job as a pub manager in the meantime. Seeburg later got back into the catering trade and ran a number of pubs Seeburg died in Reading in 1972.

References

1884 births 1972 deaths Footballers from Leipzig Sportspeople from the Kingdom of Saxony German men's footballers Men's association football midfielders English Football League players Chelsea F.C. players Tottenham Hotspur F.C. players Burnley F.C. players Grimsby Town F.C. players Reading F.C. players Leyton F.C. players {{Germany-footy-midfielder-1880s-stub