In 1987, ECD Iserlohn were on the verge of bankruptcy. Then the team’s owner hit upon a novel idea – a sponsorship deal with Libya’s unyielding leader

In next year’s NHL draft, the No1 pick won’t be the prototypical teen from Ontario, the Swedish speedster, or pummeling Muscovite. It will be an 18-year-old from Arizona who plays in Switzerland named Auston Matthews. The young phenom has ended up playing in Europe thanks to a combination of outsider hockey status – Phoenix is not exactly a hockeyhot-bed – and the logistics of being born just after the cutoff for last year’s draft.

Europe has long been a haven for North American hockey players. But most players who end up there are looking to continue the dream of making a living playing the sport they love, even if the NHL isn’t calling for them. That’s how Dan Olsen and Bruce Hardy, two Canadians, ended up in Iserlohn, just south of Dortmund in Germany. It was there that, in 1987, their hockey careers would lead them into what amounted to a dystopian version of Slap Shot. Their bankrupt team, ECD Iserlohn, turned to the most unlikely of saviors: Muammar Gaddafi.

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European hockey is a strange place: jerseys are a neoliberal dream of sponsorship patches, and top scorers on each team are marked with gold helmets; there’s a lot of gimmick and schtick that goes into making the sport financially viable as it competes with soccer for attention. Heinz Weifenbach, the owner of ECD Iserlohn, was perfect for this world. A gregarious, mustachioed, cigar-smoking bon vivant who made his fortune in real estate development, Weifenbach had poured his wealth into making Iserlohn one of Germany’s top teams.

Dan Olsen remembers “Heinzy” as full of life, and a man who wasn’t afraid to let the players know what he thought of their play.

“He would come in the dressing room sometimes and if we weren’t playing good, he’d be swearing away in German – and one time he actually came in and pulled a gun out of his pants!”

As wild as Weifenbach was, he had built a solid squad. Bruce Hardy describes him as “one of the most amazing men you’ll ever meet. He loved hockey, he loved Iserlohn, he made sure he took care of his players”. The previous season, with Hardy on the team, they had made the league semi-finals. Things were promising for the new season with a new crop brought in including Olsen. But all was not well, as the club owed the German authorities $3.4m in taxes. With the club unable to pay, the players stopped practicing, and multiple coaches came and went.

Bruce Hardy’s hockey shirt, complete with Green Book logo. Photograph: Gabriel Luis Manga/The Guardian

Players had heard rumblings of tax troubles with the team in previous years, yet Weifenbach’s tax accountant, known as “Merlin the Magician”, seemed to make the books work every season. Butthen the authorities had caught up to the team. Tax officials began showing up at the players’ apartments early in the morning, demanding to see their contracts with the team, and the declarations of income they claimed they had sent to the players. The forms and contracts were nowhere to be found, having been “taken care of” by Merlin.

As a penalty, players were fine a thousand marks each, and began seizing personal items of value to cover costs. “They took my TV, they took my leather coats, they took my football, my baseball glove, and they thought I had a gold coin, but what it was was the first year the loonie had come out in Canada”, recalls Hardy. Olsen was luckier: new to the team, the authorities didn’t know where he lived.

Needing to act quickly, Weifenbach dreamed up an idea with the mayor of a neighboring Iserlohn suburb to to save the team: fly to Libya and ask Muammar Gaddafi, Libya’s tyrannical leader, to become the team’s patron.

Greeted in Libya by Gaddafi himself, Weifenbach conducted a series of negotiations. Eventually a deal was struck. Gaddafi would give Weifenbach $900,000 for the season to keep his club afloat. Predictably, there was a catch: in exchange for the money, the team must promote Gaddafi’s Green Book – a collection of ramblings and political philosophies of the late dictator – on their jerseys.

This might appear to have come out of the blue, but Gaddafi was connected to sport. He paid Perugia and Sampdoria to carry his son Saadi Gaddafi on the roster, with owners pleading managers to allow the younger Gaddafi on the pitch in hopes of gaining more cash from the family.

Muammar Gaddafi’s connections to Germany were not new, either. Hardy remembers ads for the Green Book appearing on local taxi cabs even before their hockey team’s relationship with the Libyans, and Libyan oil was still being readily imported into Germany.

But Gaddafi was a controversial and menacing figure. In 1986, two years before the Lockerbie bombing, La Belle discotheque in Berlin had been bombed. The US pointed to Gaddafi as the culprit, claiming he targeted a nightclub where numerous US soldiers were spending the evening. Transcriptions were intercepted from the Libyan embassy in East Germany, and Reagan would go on to bomb Tripoli in response.

For Hardy, Olsen, and the rest of the team, however, Gaddafi’s investment brought a sense of relief. They were there to play hockey, wanted to see the team stay together, and were unaware or uninterested in the politics. It wasn’t until the morning before the first game that Hardy would start to realize the situation at hand. Called into the team office after the morning skate, he was told he had a phone call. “This is Tom Brokaw from New York,” said the voice at the other end. Media across the world had picked up on the story. “OK, now this is big time,” thought Hardy.

By the time the Hardy and Olsen returned to the rink for the game that night fans had been whipped into a frenzy. “It was packed. It was a zoo. It was the most amazing atmosphere I’ve ever seen in my life”, says Hardy.

Spurred on by the frenetic support, the team would win their first game under the patronage of Gaddafi, complete with Das Grune Buch emblazoned across their chests. “We sat in the dressing room looking at each other, thinking ‘what just happened?’“

The media and German ice hockey federation, on the other hand, were not amused. Der Spiegel declared Weifenbach’s hockey fiefdom as “Sodom and Gomorrah”, and interior minister Friedrich Zimmermann said: “What at first looked like a carnival joke is a flagrant violation of political neutrality of the sport”.

German national team coach Xavier Unsinn, no fan of Weifenbach for his perceived over reliance on foreign players, would criticize the team further by saying sport should not be associated with criminals and terrorism.

The following week, an away game in Frankfurt, the team was met not with desert-robed fans cheering, but instead protesters and riot police at the charged arena.

“Now we start getting threats … that there’s no guarantee on our lives. ‘You wear those sweaters and you’re in trouble,’” remembers Hardy.

The players, now realizing the magnitude of the situation, decided to take a vote. They could wear the Green Book jerseys and continue to be paid, risking further media scrutiny and possible harm, or play the game in their old sweaters sans Gaddafi and risk their team’s financial collapse. The players voted to play in their old sweaters.

Weifenbach entered the locker room and was told of the results of the impromptu player vote. He told the team he respected their decision and that as such this would be the last game for the team, with the club unable to operate without the money from the sponsorship.

Even without the vote the team would likely still have been doomed. Despite Weifenbach’s claims of the neutrality of the green book and sponsorship the German hockey federation would ban the team from featuring it on their jerseys.

It’s a moment that both players will never forget, but are rarely asked about. Olsen now coaches back in his native Calgary at the South Alberta Institute of Technology, and it wasn’t until Gaddafi’s fall in 2011 that people around him would even know of his connection.

“The president, at work, he googled Iserlohn, and the Muammar Gaddafi stuff came up. He asked, and I sat in his office talking about it, and he was in disbelief!”

Hardy is back in Alberta as well after playing over a decade in Germany, and still has his Green Book patched Iserlohn sweater. Weifenbach and the club would eventually return to the league, albeit minus Gaddafi.

Sports fans continue to grapple with the marriage of money, politics, and the games we love – just look at the Fifa corruption scandal. Weifenbach and ECD Iserlohn serve as a tale of a man who took sport and money to its ideological limits. Well intentioned in saving his club, fancying it his own version of ping-pong diplomacy, he forced fans and society to confront themselves and ask where do we draw the line in the quest to build champions?

Though he died this past year, Weifenbach will continue to be remembered as a cult hero in Iserlohn, and a man who brought about one of the most interesting yet problematic sports sponsorship of all time.