First Vienna FC

First Vienna FC is an Austrian association football club based in the Dobling district of Vienna. Established on 22 August 1894, it is the country's oldest team and has played a notable role in the history of the game there. It is familiarly known to Austrians by the English name Vienna.

History

In the early 1890s English and Austrian gardeners working for Nathaniel Anselm von Rothschild began to play football on his estates. To avoid further damage to his flowers Nathaniel ceded them a pasture nearby and also granted the team's blue-yellow kits, former jockey costumes of his riding stable. The Manx player William Beale designed the triskelion logo, also in the Rothschild colours blue and yellow, which Vienna still uses. The team played its first match on 15 November 1894 against the Vienna Cricket and Football-Club losing 0:4 to the club which would become a bitter longtime rival until the Cricketers' football team was finally dissolved in 1936. The city of Vienna quickly became the centre of Austrian football and by the end of 1896 there were seven clubs playing there, several of which also fielded reserve sides.

In 1897, the chairman of the Cricketers donated the Challenge Cup establishing a competition open to all football clubs in what was then Austria-Hungary, drawing teams from Vienna, Budapest, and Prague. Cricket won the first cup competition in 1897, but First Vienna followed with consecutive cup titles in 1899 and 1900. The club also made a losing appearance in the 1907 final of the Wiener Cup which emerged when the Challenge Cup competition fell into disarray between 1903 and 1905. In the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 Vienna performed poorly and by 1915 had fallen out of first division play and did not return to the top flight until after the war in 1919.

Glory years

The club gradually returned to form and consistently finished in the top half of the league table thro

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