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

FEW RESULTS at the ongoing Euro football championship have caught the eye as much as Austria’s 3-2 triumph over the Netherlands on June 25th. The win meant that the Austrians topped the “group of death”, leaving the thoroughbreds from France and Poland, as well as the men in orange, trailing. Having started the tournament as rank outsiders, they are now outside favourites. They are also drawing plaudits for their exuberant, attacking style of play. As one football journalist put it, “They’re fast, they’re fun and they’re so good to watch.” In this form, they will fancy their chances in their first knock-out match against Turkey on July 2nd—a feeling of optimism they are unused to. Austria have not progressed to the final stages of a major tournament for 90-odd years; in 1992 they even managed to lose to the Faroe Islands (population 46,000). If they do go all the way, however, modern football really will be coming home. For the game as it is known today was at least partly invented in the elegant coffee houses of Vienna, the Austrian capital.

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.