As last week’s Euro Footy Focus discussed in relation to Berlin football’s lack of success, history and politics can have a detrimental effect on sport.
Fitting with the times we live in, financial crises are currently the biggest threat to football with a large number of clubs on the brink of collapse. But during the 20th century, politics was the biggest threat whether it was the Cold War or World Wars.
And it was politics and war that sadly put paid to one of football’s greatest teams. Today Austria - Ireland’s opponents on Tuesday - are at most a mid-ranking European national team in footballing terms.
But back in the 1930s, the Alpine nation could claim to be the best football team in Europe – and one of the top international sides in the world.
In fact, the ‘Wunderteam’ as they have become known, are credited with creating the concept of Total Football as it was an Austrian coach - Ernst Happel - who helped to introduce it to Dutch football in the 1960s and 70s.
Blessed with a formidable generation of players like mercurial captain Matthias Sindelar - the ‘Mozart of Football’ - and Walter Nausch and a visionary manager in Hugo Meisl, that Austrian side played a captivating brand of passing football far ahead of many teams on the continent.
They were unfortunate not to win the 1934 World Cup in Mussolini’s Italy. The host nation and World Champions of 1934 and 38, knocked Sindelar and co out of the tournament in the semi-finals thanks to a dubious goal which saw the Austrian keeper pushed over the goal line (there have been many allegations over the years that referees were put under pressure by Italy’s Fascist authorities throughout that World Cup).
Austria would have been one of the favourites again in the 1938. But that is when political machinations and the heavy hand of history intervened.
It only deserves to be a mere footnote in history compared to the Holocaust, Stalingrad and other horrors of World War II, but what happened to Austrian football when the Nazis rolled into can still be considered to be a tragedy for the sport.
Sindelar also known as the Paperman in action
Nazi Germany
1938 happened to be the year of the Anschluss – Nazi Germany’s annexation of Adolf Hitler’s home country.
With Austria absorbed into a “Greater Germany”, the Austrian national team was dissolved and they had to pull out of that year’s World Cup, having already qualified.
Instead many of their players were co-opted into a combined Germany and Austria team which failed miserably in that tournament, falling at the first hurdle.
But just weeks before that tournament, Austria’s new Nazi overlords organised a friendly match in Vienna between Germany and Austria to celebrate the union.
According to the script Germany was meant to win that game and the superior Austrian side was advised to miss the presentable chances that they created.
However, Sindelar who opposed Nazism ripped up the script. Encouraging Austria to play in their own national colours of red and white instead of white and black, Austria’s greatest ever player scored in a 2 – 0 win and celebrated vigorously under the nose of the Nazi dignitaries in attendance.
Political murder?
That’s where things took a sinister turn. Having refused to represent Nazi Germany in the 1938 World Cup citing injury (his own political views were probably more relevant to his decision), nine months later the über-talented centre-foward with 43 caps and 27 goals was found dead in his apartment alongside his girlfriend. He was 35.
Carbon monoxide poisoning was cited as the cause but rumours of a murder by the Nazis have not gone away over the decades.
Although he was nearing retirement at the time, his death seemed to herald the end for Austrian football. World War II would start months later and by the end of that conflict, the footballing landscape would be changed irrevocably leaving the Alpine nation rather flat in the second half of the 20th century.
In any case, Austrian football may have declined anyway. Not blessed with a huge population, success would have been difficult to sustain in the same way that the Uruguayan team of the 1930 and the Hungary side of the 1950s were not followed by outstanding generations.
Austria have only qualified for the World Cup intermittently since the demise of the ‘Wunderteam’, with their last outing occurring at France 98 with the generation of Toni Polster and Andreas Herzog.
That year, they fell at the first hurdle. But one suspects that the nation could have lifted the most coveted trophy in world football exactly 60 years earlier – an achievement that could have created a rich tradition.
