Hamburg's dynamo
He was the goal-scorer in the early nineties: Jan Furtok gave the fans of Hamburger SV a feeling of happiness with his goals. He fell ill with Alzheimer's at an early age.

Jan Furtok (* March 9, 1962 in Katowice, Poland; † November 26, 2024) was a Polish soccer player and coach. Between his spells at GKS Katowice, where he won the Polish Cup in 1986 and finished runner-up in 1988 and is the record goalscorer with 122 goals in 299 games, the striker played 188 games in the Bundesliga for Hamburger SV and Eintracht Frankfurt between 1988 and 1995, scoring 60 goals. He scored ten times in 36 games for the Polish national team, one of which came at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico.

After his time as a player, he was coach of GKS in 2005, where he was also president from 2005 to 2009. From 2010 to 2012 he was sporting director of the national team.

Furtok was also active in the pilkarski sport, which is very popular in Poland, for many years.

Personal details
On suspicion of being an accomplice in Andrzej Rudy's escape plans, the Polish authorities initially refused to allow Furtok's wife and children, then aged four and two, to leave the country for Hamburg. The family was only allowed to travel to Hamburg two months later, after Hamburger SV called in the German Football Association. Furtok was later granted German citizenship, as his ancestors in Upper Silesia had been citizens of the German Reich.

In October 2021, it became known that he had already been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2015. Jan Furtok succumbed to it in November 2024

"In 2015, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, that insidious disease that begins so gradually and inescapably pushes people into oblivion. At some point, he no longer recognized his own reflection in the mirror, his wife told Polish media. He could no longer be found in old team photos; it was said that he only recognized Anthony Yeboah in them and no longer himself."spiegel.de

Source: de.wikipedia.org