And a goal machine. Signed from promoted second-tier side SG Wattenscheid 09 in summer 1990, “Mucki”, as the powerful 1.88-metre striker had long been known since his Münster days, exploded in Cologne. “Our great hope,” Jörg Berger later remembered, “was not Pierre Littbarski or Horst Heldt.\n\nIt was Mucki Banach.” The man who had fired Wattenscheid into the Bundesliga with 22 goals returned to the top flight and seemed finally to be making it there, after an earlier spell at Borussia Dortmund from 1986 to 1988 had yielded only two goals in 14 Bundesliga matches behind established strikers Norbert Dickel and Frank Mill. In his first season for FC he scored 13 goals in 31 matches and laid on four more.
Many in Cologne believed his elegant yet forceful penalty-box game was on a level with club greats Hannes Löhr and Dieter Müller.\n\nSporting director Udo Lattek evidently thought the same, extending Banach’s contract early. A transfer elsewhere in Germany or even to the Italian football paradise of the 1980s and early 1990s would likely have brought Köln a record fee - perhaps even more than the 7.8 million euros they had received for Thomas Häßler in 1990.