photo : Vectorportal
Austria’s second favourite sport is football. Given that they excel at skiing (their number one sporting passion), it’s perhaps surprising that they don’t do very well in the football stakes. So why isn’t Austria a major European force in football?
World Class Commitment
Whatever the Austrian’s do generally demonstrates a world class commitment to doing it well. You only have to think of their innovative achievements like the Semmering Railway – a full size mountain railway, not a narrow gauge or cog and pin as other mountain rail systems use.
Or what about their enviable achievements in relation to waste management? If you aren’t familiar with these wonders, read this for information about water conservation; or this for plastics recycling; or even this for reusing paper products. By international standards, they’ve shown they are in the world class when it comes to getting things done and being a major European force in lots of ways.
But not in football.
Austrian National Team Achievements
In the past, the Austrian National Team played a pretty impressive game. They qualified for 7 World Cup tournaments. But the last of these was in 1998 – nothing in the new Millennium.
Prior to WWΙΙ and the suppression of anything Austrian during the Anschluß (1938 – 1945, when Germany annexed it and the Nazi party philosophy dominated and suppressed everything, including the professional playing of football), the sport was fairing reasonably well. The team earned the nickname ‘Wunderteam’, having achieved Silver medal status at the summer Olympics and qualified for the 1938 FIFA World Cup.
In the ’60s and ’70s, the team continued to do well – not outstanding, but good enough to make it to the 1978 World Cup and then again in 1982. Although they qualified for the 1990 World Cup, they were eliminated in the first round and after that there wasn’t much action of note to get excited about.
Slow and Steady Decline in Performance
By the late 1990s, the Austrian team was beginning to show its age. Many of the players were retiring and leaving the game altogether. And as men get older, it isn’t unusual to find that they get slower and their performance declines in all sorts of ways. Perhaps this was the reason for their lack-lustre play?
By 2006 – with no real ‘claims to fame’ for many years, Austria began to see a new trend emerging. The average age of the players was around 23 years – young men in their prime – and a new coach, brought them to the point of qualifying as co-hosts with Switzerland for the European Championships in 2008.
Whilst you might think this would be cause for celebration, it actually brought a flood of fear to the nation. Having experienced embarrassment for so long at the failure to be a fighting force in Europe, some 10,000 Austrians signed a petition demanding they withdraw from the competition to save the nation from further humiliation. How can you expect a team to play their best when so many ‘family and friends’ showed their lack of support?
Despite this vote of no confidence, the team actually did quite well and they’ve had some memorable matches in the ensuing years (like a 3-1 win over France in the qualifying rounds for the 2010 World Cup – which was France’s only defeat in qualifying!). Unfortunately since then things have taken a turn for the worse and Austrian ängst has probably returned.
Winter World Ski Championships
The recent disappointments in the summer Olympics at London (2012) – not only in football, but also in other sports – will not have helped matters much in terms of lifting Austrian morale. But on a more positive note, they’ve got the 2013 World Ski Championships in Schladming, Styria and the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia to look forward to – a more certain bet for gold and silver medals.
Perhaps it will take some time for the national football team to regain its confidence and hereditary ‘Habsburg’ spirit; to once again be Emperors of Europe. In the meantime, you can take it as a safe bet that the country will get behind its ‘curvers and carvers’ in the coming ski season!