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. 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. 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. 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. “Austria’s Pele” was the epitome of the new type of football.