It's April 2005. Your club isn't doing too well, sitting 9th in a 10 team competition but safe because SW Bregenz has booked the only relegation spot in the Austrian Bundesliga with a terrible season. You can attend your beloved Austria Salzburg's end of season amtches without fear of going down, while the rumours get more intense about a possible takeover from Dietrich Mateschitz's energy drink company Red Bull and the whole city is buzzing at the thought of good financial backing that could make the club rise back to the top amongst the Wien clubs and possibly add some silverware, after the three league titles the violet-whites conquered in the 90's.
The takeover happens, Red Bull now owns Austria Salzburg, the ambitions skyrocket but everything seems off. The new owners change everything, essentially rejecting every bit of history that the club had accumulated in over 70 years. New name, new badge, new kits, new everything. Even the club website now states that "the club was founded in 2005". What does this mean? Where has Austria gone? There's no way the Salzburg club has gotten rid of every little bit of violet and changed it with red and white colours, every fan is shocked, so a fan initiative starts to preserve the traditional violet-white colours and a negotiation begins with the newly appointed club officials.
The lowest point of this story is reached during these uncertain times: Red Bull proposes the fans to make the goalkeeper's away socks purple, an offer so insulting that traditional fans see it as a point of no return. The fanbase splits in half: on one side those who under no condition will support the Red Bull-backed club, and on the other side those who will still support the club under a new name, a new badge and new colours. The latter will see their team rack up an incredible amount of domestic trophies and live many magic european nights against the continent's big boys, while the former decide to reject a shiny future that they couldn't feel was theirs, and founded a phoenix club to preserve the tradition of their own club.
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| Austria fans protest against Red Bull |
Austria's fans' fight against the takeover policies was and is still seen as one of the most important statements made by traditional football fans against the commercialization of modern football, and their choice to start over from zero instead of accepting the deletion of their club's entire identity in the name of silverware is possibly the most romantic thing a football fanbase can do. For such reasons the appreciation and the solidarity Austria Salzburg's fans received saw no boundaries: most Austrian first and second tier fans exposed banners backing them, and dozens more ultras groups showed support from abroad, making this one of the most globally supported causes in world football.
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| Rapid Wien fans show support to Austria Salzburg with a banner against Red Bull |
The main issue, as with every other phoenix club, is that when you start from nothing you really start from nothing. The new club had no squad, no stadium, nothing at all, but it quickly gained 800 members that left the Red Bull club, and when it finally started as an indipendent club in the 2006-07 season the team even fielded some players that used to be supporters! The new adventure began in the lowest possible league, the Salzburg 2nd Class North-A, a.k.a. the 7th tier of the Austrian football pyramid. As new chairman Walter Windischbauer said in a Reuters interview in 2011, "It's relatively easy in lower leagues if you have big abitions, we were more motivated than our opponents and the home fans were another factor". It's hard to disagree with that, as we imagine a thousand fans jumping and singing in Austrian amateur leagues where the usual average attendance is probably lower than a hundred people!
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| Austria fans away at USC Mattsee in 2007 |
In this context, the new Austria Salzburg had no trouble gaining promotion year after year, as they managed four straight league wins and got up to the Regionalliga by 2010, in the third tier. The rise back to professionalism could only be secured in 2015, when the club finally achieved promotion to the 2. Liga after five years in the Regionalliga. In the first season back in the second tier however Austria found itself in financial trouble again, with a €1.4m debt hanging over its head. The team finished 9th out of 10, avoiding relegation on the field despite a 6 point deduction, but the club was relegated back to the Regionalliga anyway due to the insolvency. The following season trouble would not end: Austria finished 15th out of 16th and suffered back to back relegations that set the club back in the fourth tier, with massive financial problems. The club could only be saved through donations, and after getting back on its feet financially it could once more rise to the Regionalliga, where it has competed until 2024 and during the pandemic years.
On September 27th 2023 however, 18 years after the Red Bull takeover, the two Salzburg clubs faced each other off in the Austrian cup second round. This was the first time the two clubs had played each other, so Austria fans, knowing the importance of the fixture, went all out with their tifos to show which club was the real Salzburg club. The match finished 0-4 in Red Bull's favour, but the result would have always been a secondary issue, as the main goal was to assert dominance over the city in terms of fanbase and ultras scene. Before the game began, Austria's ultras exposed a tifo showing Mozart, who famously was from Salzburg, banging on a red bull's head with a violin. This image represented the tradition of the city, in this case Austria, rejecting Red Bull and its takeover.
After this clever display, a pyro show began, which apparently got them a €30k fine from the Federation.
The 2023-24 ended in a league win for the violet, but promotion was rejected due to lacking infrastructure, so as of now Austria Salzburg is still playing in the Regionalliga. Their story is one of the biggest and most notable examples of loving your club and your colours regardless of the league and the trophies, and the support they got over the last two decades shows how many football fans still care about it, despite modern football screwing over traditional and loyal fans in favour of money. One day they will be back in the top tier playing against Red Bull and showing them whose city Salzburg is, and everyone will love it.
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