Education
During the war, Appel played for Hertha Bachelor of Science and for an unofficial Dutch national team, made up of Dutch forced labourers.
During the war, Appel played for Hertha Bachelor of Science and for an unofficial Dutch national team, made up of Dutch forced labourers.
Appel played for ADO Den Haag in the Dutch league in the 1930s. He was forced to work in a factory in Berlin, Germany in 1942. The factory where he worked was bombed a year later, and Appel narrowly survived.
His refusal to give the Hitler salute before matches made the German authorities furious.
The Royal Dutch Football Association suspended Appel after the liberation in 1945. He left for France in 1949, and became an important player for Stade Reims.
Appel scored 96 goals in 154 matches for Stade Reims. Appel and Theo Timmermans took the initiative for a charity match for the victims of the North Sea flood of 1953, between France and Dutch football players playing abroad.
The match was not an official international, because the Dutch players had been suspended from the Dutch national team
The Royal Dutch Football Association did not allow football players to be professionals. This match, however, paved the way for the acceptance of professional football in the Netherlands. Two years later, the ban on professionalism was lifted
Appel returned to the Netherlands in 1954, having been signed by Fortuna "54 as one of the first professional football players in the Dutch league.
He left the world of football after the title, and became a real estate agent.
He lived a reclusive life at the end, and he died on 31 October 1997, one-month before his 76th birthday.
He was, however, a member of the Netherlands national football team at the 1948 Summer Olympics.