Bert Sproston: The Footballer Who Defied Hitler

Bert Sproston was one of England’s finest footballers of the 1930s. Yet the act for which he most deserves to be known took place away from the football pitch.

Born in Cheshire on 22 June 1915, Sproston played for Leeds United, Manchester City, Millwall and Tottenham Hotspur. He won 11 caps for England and a further two wartime internationals, establishing himself as one of the country’s leading full-backs.

In 1938 Sproston travelled with England to Berlin for the infamous match against Nazi Germany. Although he later claimed to know little about politics, he reportedly told fellow England player Stanley Matthews:

“I know nowt ’bout politics and t’like. All I knows is football. But t’way I see it, yon ’Itlerfella is an evil little twat.”

After the match, a 17-year-old Jewish footballer named Rolf Friedland approached Sproston and begged for help escaping Germany. Back in England, Sproston used his contacts at Tottenham Hotspur and the Football Association to secure Friedland an invitation to a representative football match, effectively sponsoring his visa to Britain. Arriving in Britain only weeks before Kristallnacht, when anti-Jewish violence erupted across Nazi Germany, Friedland escaped the persecution that would soon engulf much of Europe.

Bert Sproston returned to football after the war and later spent more than twenty years as a trainer at Bolton Wanderers. He died in 2000 at the age of eighty-four.

Rolf Friedland went on to build a new life in Britain, marrying, raising a family and seeing that family grow across the decades that followed. Every child, grandchild and great-grandchild can trace their story back to one footballer’s decision to stop and help a frightened teenager in Berlin in 1938.

Further reading

Escape from Berlin: England’s Bert Sproston and the Football Refugee by John Leonard