Over the weekend I had my first experience of the Austrian Bundesliga, watching Rapid Vienna defeat Wolfsberg 2-0. But honestly, it was quite a mixed bag.
Rapid Vienna are Austria’s most successful club, winning 32 Austrian Bundesligas (and one German whilst Austria were under Nazi occupation) but it’s not all success. Their fans are growing tired, going trophy-less since 2008 and Saturday’s win was their first since November.
Rapid Vienna’s ground holds 28,000 but the match attendance was a little over 10,000 as the ultras group opted to boycott in the wake of their derby defeat to Austria Vienna a week prior. It’s unknown whether the protests were against the on-field results or the ruling to ban away fans at the Vienna derbies for two years, or both. But even as someone who hadn’t been to a Rapid match before, you could feel their absence in a really flat stadium.
Culturally, away following isn’t a big thing in Austria either. According to fans both online and in the ground, it only tends to be the Vienna clubs and Sturm Graz that bring a big support away from home, so the lack of a lively following in both ends almost definitely contributed to a slow game that played like a training one.
The less said about the match the better to be honest. I don’t think I need to come up with other synonyms for the words ‘slow’ and ‘flat’ when trying to describe the game. There wasn’t many chances. Both Rapid’s goals came largely out of nowhere, albeit the second one was a well-taken finish. Other than that, you could hear the boos from the fans that did bother to turn up and when the people around us heard Scottish and English accents they apologised to us for what we were watching and what we came to.
The result does however shake up the league for what looks to be an interesting one from an outside perspective. The Austrian Bundesliga works the similar to the Scottish Premiership, where there is a 12-team league that splits into a top and bottom six. We’re now two games away from the split and 12 matches remain overall. Rapid climbed into the top six whilst Wolfsberg slip to 9th. However, Wolfsberg are only three points away from the top six and sit 11 points off top spot overall. The talk of the terraces is that Rapid are enduring another disastrous season, but they are only 7 points away from the summit currently.
Of course, there are still some upsides to the experience. It probably seems like I didn’t enjoy myself, but I really did. A lot of football fans will tell you that the worst part of the day is the match itself and that’s definitely true in this instance.
The Rapid fans sitting around us talked us through the club, their history, their poor form and were intrigued at tourists coming to their stadium, which is nice with football tourism being somewhat stigmatised at the biggest clubs. Two of these fans were also glad to hear that Austrian goalkeeper Raphael Sallinger is playing well at Hibs.
As a Scotsman, it’s also nice being able to get a beer at the match, considering Scottish football fans aren’t trusted to do so and are being punished for something that happened 40 years ago. Lo and behold, there was no trouble, but a good time was had.
As a city, Vienna was absolutely beautiful and one that I’d certainly re-visit. If I did then, I’d definitely look to do another Rapid match. Hopefully this one wouldn’t be subject to a boycott and there will be some ‘feel-good’ around the club again. In the meantime, I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on their results and hope they get a surprise league title over the line, the fans that did turn up definitely deserve it.
