Why football might (just) be coming home, to Austria

As it was to many countries, football was introduced to Austria by English expats. First, they formed a cricket club (of course) in Vienna, but then started playing football, in the grounds of Baron Rothschild’s estate. Thus was born the “First Vienna Cricket and Football-Club”, which in November 1894 lined up against the “Vienna Football Club” for the country’s first official match. (For the record, the cricketers beat the footballers 4-0.) The game quickly caught on, and the first league championship was played in the 1911-12 season. However, the relatively simple, muscular game imported from Britain underwent a dramatic transformation in Vienna, emerging as a sophisticated battle of wits, deploying new, more fluid playing formations (dubbed the “Danubian Whirl”) that also demanded a new breed of player. According to Jonathan Wilson, a historian of football tactics, for this to happen “the game had to be taken up by a social class that instinctively theorised and deconstructed, that was as comfortable planning in the abstract as it was with reacting on the field, and, crucially, that suffered none of the distrust of intellectualism that was to be found in Britain.”

That “social class” comprised precociously brilliant, often Jewish, Viennese, who were at the time reinventing almost everything, from medicine to music, art and economics, as well as football. It was a cohort that included the likes of Sigmund and Anna Freud, Arnold Schoenberg, Karl Popper and Ludwig von Mises. Intellectuals and artists mingled together with the football fans in the uniquely democratic milieu of Vienna’s 600 or so coffee houses. Football journalists, opera and theatre critics gathered at the Ring Café, described as a “revolutionary parliament of the friends and fanatics of football”. The clubs themselves adopted their own cafés: Rapid Vienna the Café Holub, Austria Vienna the Parsifal. Here, for the price of a Wiener Melange, anyone could bend the ear of managers and coaches.

The idol of Vienna’s coffee-house culture was Matthias Sindelar (pictured). “Austria’s Pele” was the epitome of the new type of football. Rather than the usual burly centre-forward, Sindelar was a slight, creative genius, nicknamed der Papierene (“the paper man”) for his ability to drift through defences, the forerunner of modern midfield maestros such as Luka Modric or Bernardo Silva. It was an admiring theatre critic, Alfred Polgar, who wrote that Sindelar had “brains in his legs”. Initially, the Austrian manager, Hugo Meisl, was reluctant to play Sindelar, but the clamour from the Ring Café became too much. The results of his inclusion were spectacular. Affectionately known as das Wunderteam, Austria stunned the football world by beating Scotland 5-0 in 1931, Germany 6-0 and then England, finally, in 1936. Austria also reached the semi-finals of the World Cup in 1934.

The golden age came to an end in March 1938 with the Anschluss, when Hitler’s Germany invaded its southern neighbour, absorbing Austria into the Reich. Das Wunderteam was no more, and Sindelar, a staunch socialist, died in suspicious circumstances in his flat in January 1939. Other European teams, however, such as Italy, had been watching and learning. That teams began to talk of playing with distinct philosophies owes much to Vienna. If Austria do prosper at the Euros 2024, it will be a late, glorious vindication of der Papierene and football as a waltz.

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