🇦🇹 Graz AK (Austria)

Graz AK (Austria)

From Australia to Austria, a country that, when you think about it in relation to football, you think, ‘Yeah they are a stable country, always there and there abouts when it comes to qualifying for major international tournaments and their football clubs do okay when they compete in either the Champions League or Europa League.’ Austria seems like a sensible country, one that you would not think would have many ‘Forgotten Clubs’. Think again. No country is safe and in Austria there are plenty of clubs that I could have chosen, but landed on this club, as I believe they are probably one of the most high-profile casualties from Austria. This is a club who had only recently competed in Europe and had in fact even beaten English giants, Liverpool FC at one stage. It’s hard to think that a club who could beat a club like Liverpool would then find themselves to not exist at all only a few years later. Of course, they have re-emerged as a phoenix club and thanks to their fans they are still represented today, but the facts are, it isn’t the same club it once was. Probably seen as the smaller club in Graz, or the ‘little brother’, this club still possess a lot of footballing history and was well followed by its passionate fans. Again, mismanagement and bad financial planning are the reasons this club fell on hard times and saw it fall into the category of a ‘Forgotten Club’. The story of Graz AK or GAK for short is as intriguing as you might expect and one you will find very interesting. Here is their story.

Originally founded as Grazer Athletiksport Klub (GAK) in 1902, and from the Austrian city of Graz, the club was part of a franchise of sports clubs ranging from sports such as basketball, diving and tennis. But football, of course, was the most popular. The club itself was founded by a medical student from Prague named Georg August Wagner with help from other associates of his. The club itself was modelled on another Austrian club Wiener AC. Wagner had organised the first public match in present day Austria eight years before the club GAK was formed. In March 1894 a match took place between two sides in the Graz municipal park. (Unfortunately, there is no official record of this game, no names of the clubs or even a final score but it known to be Austria’s first real football match. One can only assume Wagner used the name GAK as one of the clubs who participated, especially as eight years later he helped form the club officially) The club itself flirted with mediocracy for the first 50 years of its existence and there was not much success to talk about until the 1960’s when they saw minor success in coming second in the Austrian Bundesliga, the clubs highest ever finish to date. They also reached their first Austrian Cup final in 1961 but were beaten 4-1 by Austrian Wien. From that season they then entered European competition with their first match coming against Odense BK in the Cup Winners Cup in 1962. They then made their second appearance in an Austrian Cup final but again were beaten, this time 2-0 by Rapid Wien in the1967-68 season.

The club made regular appearances in Europe from then on, without making any impression in any of the tournaments. It wasn’t until 1981 when the club won its first major trophy. After their third attempt the club finally lifted the Austrian Cup, beating SV Austria Salzburg 2-1 on aggregate over two legs after losing 1-0 in the first leg, GAK turned it around and won 2-0 in the second leg, albeit they needed extra time to do so. Their next cup triumph didn’t come until the 1999-00 season when they won it again, this time needing penalties to beat, yet again SV Austrian Salzburg. The game itself finished 2-2. Their third Cup triumph was probably their sweetest as it came t the expense of their biggest rivals Sturm Graz, They beat their city rivals 3-2 in a thriller of a cup final in 2001-02 season in what proved to be the most successful decade in the clubs history. They went on to become runners-up in the Austrian Bundesliga in the 2002-03 season. But the season after proved to be their most successful one in the club’s history. They finally won the Austrian Bundesliga but also completed the league and cup double with a win in the Austrian Cup final against Austrian Wien. The game itself finished 2-2 in normal time with GAK’s Kollmann scoring an equaliser in the 86th minute. GAK went behind again in extratime when Austria Wien’s Gilwicz scored in the 99th minute only for GAK to hit back minutes later with a goal from Aufhauser. Te game went to penalties and GAK won 5-4 after Wien’s Dundee missed the decisive penalty. As mentioned, the club regular took part in European competition but never really made it out of the group stages, only once making it as far as the last 16 in the 2004-05 season when they eventually were knocked about by English club Middlesbrough 4-3 on aggregate.

But arguably their biggest and most famous result in European competition came against another English club in the Champions League Third Qualifying round in 2004-05 season against European giants Liverpool. Although knocked out 2-1 on aggregate, GAK did beat them in Austria 1-0. This became an even bigger result for the club as Liverpool eventually went on to win the European cup that year, famously beating AC Milan on that night in Istanbul.

But the golden years for the club as they were known came to a crashing end and in the 2006-07 season the club went into administration and a s aresult were docked 28 points. The next season the club were not allowed to participate in any of Austria’s professional leagues and were relegated to the Austria Regional League Central. The bad news kept coming and the club declared bankruptcy again and although a settlement was made with the creditors in September 2008, four years later the club dissolved after their relegation to the Regionalliga Mitte.

This resulted in a phoenix club being set up by the fans in 2012, who refused to let Grazer AK disappear. The new club would be called Grazer AC and they originally competed in the bottom tier of Austrian football from the start of 2013-14 season. It was in 2014, though, that a meeting took place to consider who Graz AC and the final conclusion was that they were a continuous version of GAK and so become GAK once again. Even more impressive has been the rise of the club since, winning back-to-back championships every year to regain their professional football status and to be playing in the second tier of Austrian football to this day. (2019-20 season) The club currently play at the same stadium as their local rivals Sturm Graz at the Liebernauer Stadium.

There was only ever one place I was going to go to get an insight into Austrian football. When I joined Twitter a few years ago, and started Forgotten Clubs, one of the first podcasts I came across on the platform was one about Austrian football. It was the brilliantly named ‘The Other Bundesliga’. Hosted by three lads from England, Tom, Lee and Simon, I was determined to have them contribute to this book, and of course they answered my questions. Extremely insightful as always, here is what they had to say when I posed them with my seven questions.

Cheers lads, for taking the time to answer my questions on Graz AK and Austrian football. First of all, your podcast The Other Bundesliga is brilliant and is one of the first ones I started listening to when I joined Twitter, but I have to ask, why Austrian football? What was the story behind that for yourselves?

The Other Bundesliga: Thanks for checking out the pod from the early days! It started out as the three of us were mates who had all happened to move to Vienna for our separate jobs. We met there and were regularly watching games, and we also all worked in one way or another in sport, so at some point once Tom learned to record and edit audio properly when working for a radio station, we thought “why not make a podcast in English?” We all love local leagues and the football which is near to us as people who are living in Austria, so we figured if we’re really going to get to know the game here, we should kind of go on a journey along with people on Twitter for example, who might want to learn about the league as we discover it! We also figured that nobody was really looking at the game here from an outsider’s perspective, and a lot of good young players were starting to come through, Salzburg were always on the verge of the UCL but hadn’t made it there yet… it just seemed like it could be a good time to start covering a league which we hoped would be on an upward trajectory in the coming years, and as it has proven, that’s exactly what ended up happening! Now suddenly there are loads of big European games and people are realising that they know nothing about the league here, and are therefore turning to us for some insight!

There were plenty of clubs to choose from when it came to selecting a 'Forgotten Club' from Austria. I landed on Graz AK, but what other club from Austria would you say has an interesting story behind them?

The Other Bundesliga: Grazer AK is definitely a great choice, but sadly a lot of other Austrian clubs have had complex histories with financial problems or mergers into other clubs. Clubs like Hakoah Vienna were once a well-known name and now no longer exist. More recently, Bundesliga side Mattersburg SV simply folded after a bank scandal involving their chief financier, but we’d say Wacker Innsbruck would be a great shout. Under the guise of FC Tirol they had Jogi Löw as their coach, and were dominating the league as recently as 20 years ago, and as of today they’re fighting for their lives in amateur football, despite being relatively well supported and respected as a big name in Austrian football.

Graz AK, seem like the little brother of Graz football, however they still seem to have a strong following. So why in your opinion did it all fall apart for them?

The Other Bundesliga: GAK are definitely the “little brother” of football in Austria’s second city at the moment, but for much of the last century the histories of Sturm and GAK were fairly closely aligned, with peaks and troughs for each club over the years. Thanks to the regional basis of leagues in the past, a huge part of the history of the two clubs involves decisive derby games going one way or another, so it’s no wonder that the two sides are part of one of the very biggest derbies in the country. We weren’t covering Austrian football back in 2007 when GAK declared the first of four bankruptcy proceedings which would eventually end the club in effect, but before that they were seemingly financially backed to a large extent by the building machinery company Liebherr, which is a relatively big name worldwide even today. Apparently at some point, the money ran out, and all of a sudden this club which had recently been winning leagues, cups and playing in Europe, was wiped off the face of Austrian football. It was a major scandal and a big shame of course, but football simply doesn’t make great amounts of cash in this country. If you’re spending big to chase the titles, you need to succeed to keep the balancing act going. As soon as the success falls away, there’s a whole in the finances. If you look at clubs in different Austrian states, Salzburg, Tyrol, Carinthia, there are very similar stories from other clubs around the same time, so whilst GAK’s fate was a massive shame, it was definitely not an isolated case.

Of course, Graz AK are still going, under a different model I suppose, but do you think they will get back to the level they were at, playing European football, and once again playing with the elite or us the gap between the top clubs and everyone else just too much?

The Other Bundesliga: If we think about the GAK side who beat Liverpool in their famous UCL winning year, and the famous Graz reds who were winning silverware in Austria as recently as 2004, it’s hard to imagine that happening again in our lifetimes. It’s unfathomable that anyone can usurp Salzburg in their current guise, they’re in a league of their own, so nobody can really imagine becoming a regular trophy winner here. The continuation club of GAK have bounced back through the leagues in some style, as well-loved phoenix clubs sometimes do, but they’ve found their level at the moment, and they’re pretty much mid-table in the Austrian second tier. It’s definitely possible that they can win the second division and get promotion to the Bundesliga in the near future though. Much like the English Championship, there seem to be new teams making up the top six every season in “Liga Zwa” as it’s known over here. So one day soon, GAK can certainly win that, and we can see them being a popular team in the Bundesliga, given that they have a fan base which would fit right in, and fans all over the state of Styria would be happy to see the Grazer Derby come back more often. We just had one in the ÖFB Cup (Sturm won 1-0) which was the first derby in 15 years, and it was very much celebrated, so hopefully that can become a more regular fixture in the Austrian football scene.

Austrian football, at an international level, has always seemed to be stable, as in the national team always seem to be always in with a shout of qualification or actually qualifying for major tournaments. What do you think is the limit for them? Do you ever envisage the Austrian national team winning or even challenging for a major honour in the future?

The Other Bundesliga: The Austrian national team is a strange one to analyse. The most talented players such as Alaba are often a complex problem for national team coaches, working out how to get the best out of a bunch of players who play in quite specific ways at their club sides. We saw Austria put up a decent effort but ultimately get relegated from Nations League A in 2022, so they’ve sort of hit their ceiling between the B and A level, but they’re probably closer to the B group in reality. The current debate is basically that the players, the league quality and just the talent level in the national side is actually higher than the results are suggesting, so hopefully qualification will become more of a formality in the future, if they can make the most of their potential. Winning a competition is not really a reality for Austria, but if you look at our smaller neighbours rather than comparing to Germany, there should be no reason that Austria couldn’t emulate what a nation like Croatia have managed in the last decade or so. The league their is much weaker, and they don’t exactly have a massive population or hugely well financed game there, so if Croatia can produce so many good national teams, then ideally Austria could too. That being said, football is a much bigger deal in Croatia than in Austria, where it plays second fiddle to skiing!

David Alaba is probably the best know footballer in recent times to come from Austria. But who in your opinion is the best Austrian footballer to have played for the national team and who is the best player to have ever played in the Austrian league?

The Other Bundesliga: The best ever player to play for Austria might be Matthias Sindelar, “The Paper Man”. Revered for his technical talents, he was pivotal for a few of the Vienna club sides in the early days of European football, and was a key part of the “Wunder Team” of the 1930s, regarded perhaps as Austria’s greatest ever national team. He also died in suspicious circumstances after humiliating the Nazis during Austria’s annexation in WWII, so he’s a figure that attracts a lot of interest. The best player ever to play in the Bundesliga? Recency bias may be affecting things somewhat, but we’d have to go with Erling Haaland. We’re quite happy and a bit proud that he made his breakthrough here, and then when people said “but it’s only Austria”, he managed to go even better in the Champions League, the German Bundesliga, and now the Premier League. He’s a once-in-a-generation striker, and we got to see him emerge here first hand, which was really special. There’s a little known fact that may be of interest as we’re talking about GAK here, and that’s also that Sergej Milinkovic-Savic, now valued at over 100m, started out at GAK as a kid, as his father won the league here with the Graz side. He didn’t go on to play as an adult here, but nonetheless, his start in football was in the red half of Graz!

Finally, with the creation of the Europa Conference League, can you ever see an Austrian club winning a European trophy in the near future? Red Bull Salzburg, Sturm Graz are just two clubs that come to mind that may do it at some level or is there another club you fancy to make the breakthrough?

The Other Bundesliga: The Europa Conference League should be a real boost to Austria’s chances of success in Europe, in theory. If you look at the last few seasons, Salzburg have gone beyond the UCL groups, WAC and LASK have gone beyond the UEL groups, and LASK again went past the UECL group stages with a very good group campaign last season. These are tiny teams in the grander scheme of things though, and if you look at the European map as a whole, the new competition structure has really just allowed the underperforming “big names” to get to the latter stages of a lesser competition. Sides with former Champions League stature make up most of the UEL knockouts, and huge clubs even end up near the business end of the UECL, so whilst in theory it helps Austrian teams to go further, they’re not likely to be beating the likes of Roma or Marseille, the ilk of teams who are in the latter stages. Salzburg should have a genuine chance of winning one of the lower two, but they’re unlikely to see any UECL action soon, and they haven’t really done as well as expected when they’ve dropped into the UEL recently. Oh well, we can still hope!

One of the more high-profile clubs I have covered in this book, and too be honest, a whole book could be dedicated to their story alone. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time or space to cover it all, so you will have to make do with the edited version, for now. But Graz is a city that loves its football but one that may not be big enough for two high profile clubs. GAK fans would certainly disagree with that, and I think it is vital that this club builds itself back up to revive a regular derby in the city of Graz. Rivalries are what make football special, as long as they aren’t taken too far of course. This one between the two clubs of GAK and Sturm Graz feels like a big brother/little brother type of rivalry, one that can be won by either side on any given day. There is no doubt that GAK are the little brother of the two clubs but that does not make them any less significant in the Austrian football league or indeed in the world of football. Their passionate fan base deserves to see their club back competing at a higher level and maybe, with proper planning and a bit of luck, they may get to see it happen soon. Hopefully they have learned from past mistakes, and unlike other clubs who have featured in this book, they have been given a second chance. They are currently playing in the second tier of Austrian football, and it does seem like they have found their level there now, however, like The Other Bundesliga guys said, there is every chance they could gain promotion in the next few years as the second tier is unpredictable at best. That would mean a return of the Graz derby, on a consistent basis of course and let’s face it, who wouldn’t want to see the Graz derby back? Let’s hope it happens soon.