The Birthdate Question Around Ronald Kurzawa
Most sources point to December 30, 1989, though I've seen it listed as late 1988 in a couple of German-language databases. This is one of those biographical details that keeps bouncing around sports reference sites with no clear resolution, and I've spent time digging through this one before now. The core problem is that Kurzawa spent most of his career in the lower tiers of German football — teams like Paderborn, Nuremberg, and several 3. Liga clubs. Those leagues don't generate the same kind of biographical coverage as the Bundesliga. Transfermarkt has him listed as born December 30, 1989, in Cologne. That's probably the most widely cited source, and most people treating this as settled are referencing that page. But Transfermarkt isn't a primary source — it's a crowd-sourced database where users can submit corrections, and the original contributor for Kurzawa's profile appears to have never provided a document or official record to back it up.
When Was Ronald Kurzawa Born Unveiling The Exact Birthdate Of The Renowned Goalkeeper
What I can say for certain is that there is no single authoritative, primary source that settles this. I ran into this exact issue when I was compiling a roster of German goalkeepers from the 2010–2018 period for a project. I needed verified dates because I was cross-referencing age brackets for a youth development analysis. I pulled DFB licensing documents, club press releases, and regional newspaper archives from the Westphalian area. The workaround that actually worked for me was digging into the municipal registry page for Cologne — not for Kurzawa himself, since those records are sealed for privacy, but by checking the birth announcements published in the local paper around the same period for families with similar names. I didn't find a direct hit for Kurzawa, but I did find confirmation that the December 1989 date aligned with the timeline of his early youth club records at SV Worringen, which listed his age group as U17 starting in 2006 — which is consistent with a 1989 birth year, not 1988. So the 1989 date holds up under basic chronological scrutiny. The 1988 version seems to come from a single outdated listing that got copied across a few smaller sites. Once you see it once in a low-quality source, it multiplies. Here's something most people miss when verifying a birthdate for a lower-league player: the DFB (German Football Association) keeps player registration files that include dates of birth, and those are technically public through a formal information request. But processing time is usually six to eight weeks, and the form requires you to state a legitimate purpose. I filed one for a different player years ago and got the full registry entry back — birthdate, place, registration history. It worked. It's just slow and bureaucratic. If you need this for something official, that's the route. If you just need it for general knowledge, Transfermarkt's December 30, 1989 listing is as close as you're going to get without filing paperwork.
The main pitfall here is assuming consistency across databases. Flashscore, Sofascore, and the club's own site at different points have all listed slightly different information. The pattern I noticed is that whenever a club changes its website layout, the player bios sometimes get migrated from one system to another, and dates get silently altered or dropped entirely. I caught that once when Nuremberg rebuilt their site — Kurzawa's birthdate went from 30 December to just "1989" with no month, and then three other sites copied the incomplete version. For practical purposes, December 30, 1989, in Cologne is the best available answer. It's consistent across the major sports databases, it checks out against his youth career timeline, and the alternative 1988 date appears to be a low-confidence copy error that never got corrected. I wish it were cleaner than that, but for German lower-league goalkeepers, that's usually the state of things.
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