VfL Germania 1894
| VfL Germania 1894 | |||
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| Basic data | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Surname | Association for physical exercises Germania 1894 eV |
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| Seat | Frankfurt am Main | ||
| founding | August 26, 1894 | ||
| Colours | Black-and-white | ||
| Website | www.germania1894.de | ||
| First soccer team | |||
| Head coach | Hasan Basci | ||
| Venue | Mainwasen sports complex | ||
| Places | nb | ||
| league | District League A Frankfurt (Group Southeast) | ||
| 2016/17 | 2nd place | ||
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The Frankfurt soccer club Germania , which was founded on August 26, 1894 and has appeared as VfL Germania 1894 since its merger with VfL Sachsenhausen 03 in June 1933 , is the oldest soccer club in Frankfurt am Main . Today's Bundesliga team from Eintracht Frankfurt emerges indirectly from its nucleus . Furthermore, the transfer of some experienced Germania players to FSV Frankfurt , which was founded in 1899, brought this club forward quickly and made the Bornheimers one of the best teams in the city early on. Germania is therefore considered the nucleus of Frankfurt football par excellence.
history
Pioneer of Frankfurt football
With its early founding as a football club in 1894, the FFC Germania took on a pioneering role. Because in the first five years of its existence there were only a few teams with which the Frankfurt football enthusiasts could compete under competitive conditions. Two of them came from Hanau, which is in the immediate vicinity of Frankfurt : FC Hanau 93 , the oldest football club in Hesse , and Viktoria Hanau in 1894 . All other clubs from southern Germany that existed at the time were based outside of Hesse, which made it necessary to go a long way to compete against other competition opponents such as the Karlsruher FV , founded in 1891 , the Freiburg FC or the 1. FC Pforzheim .
The club lived up to its pioneering role insofar as it - through two of its board members - played a key role in founding the Association of South German Football Associations (VSFV) on October 17, 1897. Board members of Germania also helped found the German Football Association (DFB) on January 28, 1900, as well as the Frankfurter Association Bundes .
The nucleus of Frankfurt Eintracht
Because football quickly gained enormous popularity and the club had many colleagues who were not or insufficiently used, there were soon a number of dissatisfied members. Some of these left Germania and founded their own club on March 8, 1899, the Frankfurt soccer club Victoria . In the same year, the Frankfurt Football Club of 1899 and the Frankfurter Football Club Kickers , which former Germania members were also involved in founding, were established. These two clubs merged in 1900 to form the Frankfurt football club 1899 Kickers , which in 1904 became the Kickers Frankfurt football club . In 1911 this club merged with FC Victoria Frankfurt (the former FFC Victoria) to form the Frankfurt soccer club (Kickers-Victoria) from 1899 . From the merger of this club with the Frankfurt gymnastics community in 1861 in 1920, Eintracht Frankfurt was finally created.
Germania sports fields
The beginnings of the Frankfurt football lying on the dog area , a formerly green open space near the northwest corner of the intersection Eschersheimer Landstrasse / Alleenring , today at the Miquelallee the Hansaallee crosses. Football has been played on this lawn since around 1890 and this is where Germania's first comrades-in-arms met. The teams from Eintracht's predecessors Kickers and Victoria as well as 1. Bockenheimer FC 1899 , which later became SG Rot-Weiß Frankfurt , played here.
In order to finally get a place of its own that took account of the steadily increasing interest of the audience, the club leased a meadow area behind the Hundswiese from the city in 1906 and built the first fenced football field in Frankfurt there. This was located at the Taunusblick milk cure facility , Eschersheimer Landstraße 237. 3,000 paying spectators attended the opening game against DFC Prague . But the laboriously created homestead was to be withdrawn from the association a few years later; because the city declared the site to be a residential area as early as 1913 and terminated the lease.
In this emergency situation, the club benefited from its close connection to the Frankfurter Turnverein (FTV) 1860 , which the hockey department of FFC Germania had already joined the previous year. On August 1, 1913, the remaining club as a whole joined the FTV 1860 as the FC GERMANIA 1894 football division in the FTV.
The FTV had leased the recently drained marshland of Sandhöfer Wiesen in Frankfurt-Niederrad from the city on a long-term basis and built an exemplary sports facility there, on which the footballers of FC Germania 1894 settled. Here on June 13, 1920, the final of the German soccer championship took place in front of 30,000 spectators between the two Franconian rivals, which 1. FC Nürnberg won 2-0 against SpVgg Fürth .
During these years, FC Germania celebrated great successes in the city derbies when it knocked off the two big Frankfurt rival clubs FSV (1919) and Eintracht (1921) with 5: 1 each. At that time international friendly matches were also common on the local Sandhöfer meadows against such renowned teams as MTK Budapest , Young Boys Bern , Wacker Leipzig , Vienna AC and Galatasaray Constantinople , all of which FC Germania won. The club also made a trip to Sweden in May 1922 , where it was able to prevail in a tournament against the best teams in the country and was presented with the winner's cup by the Swedish King Gustav V himself .
1923 decided German Turnerschaft the clean break from gymnastics and sport, in its consequence, the Germania broke away from the FTV 1860 and as 1. FFC Germania 1894 became independent again. The friendly relationship with FTV 1860 remained, however, and Germania was allowed to continue to use Sandhöfer Wiesen as its home ground.
Only a few bright spots left
After the Second World War , the club went downhill continuously. Although it was the first sports club in Hesse to get a license again, it was relegated twice within a few years and therefore quickly found itself in the lowlands of football. In order to stop the rapid downward trend, the club built a new soccer team in 1955, which consisted primarily of players from its own offspring (last year's A youth team). The realignment quickly bore fruit, because as early as 1956 the newly formed team won the championship of the district class B Frankfurt-West and thus managed a direct return to the district class A. In 1963, it even managed to return to the second amateur league at short notice; but in the decades to come, Germania developed into an " elevator team " that shuttled between district leagues A and B.
For the first time in 1990 the club managed to escape the district class when it rose to the newly created district league Frankfurt-West . Three years later, at the end of the 1992/93 season, there was even promotion to the Landesliga Hessen Süd, at that time the fourth-highest division in German club football.
The renewed decline of Germania began on April 25, 1997, because from now on the previous first chairman Werner Brendel, who was also the main sponsor of the association, increasingly withdrew. At the end of the 1997/98 season, there was relegation from the now only fifth-rate Landesliga Süd to the sixth-rate district league. Right at the beginning of the 1998/99 season, a real player exodus set in and the newly signed coach Gerhard Ott also left the club after only two training sessions, so that the team was passed straight through to the district league. Affected by another bloodletting, the team was relegated to the district league A at the end of the 2000/01 season and a year later to the district league B. Four relegations within just four years meant the end of all hopes, possibly one day league football To bring Mainwasen. After all, at least after only one season (2002/03), the direct return to the district league A Group South-East, in which the club's first team is also represented in the 2011/12 season. In the 2008/09 season they had made promotion to the Frankfurt district league, but rose again after only two years. VfL finished the 2015/16 season in 13th place in the district league A.
The sporting home of Germania is the Mainwasen sports complex in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen .
Former players
The two greatest football talents that emerged from the club were Fritz Becker and Gerhard Welz .
The striker Fritz Becker, who took part in the first international match of a German national soccer team against Switzerland (3: 5) on April 5, 1908 in Basel and scored two goals, including the first international goal in German soccer history. However, at that time Becker was already in the service of the competitor "FC Frankfurter Kickers 1899", one of the predecessors of today's Eintracht.
Although by then it had already disappeared into the lowlands of football, the club produced another young talent in the 1960s, Gerhard Welz. The goalkeeper, who was later even appointed to the German national team, left VfL in 1966 to make his way as a professional footballer, which led him to the position of regular goalkeeper at 1. FC Köln .
literature
- Hardy Greens : Legendary football clubs. Hesse. Between FC Alsbach, Eintracht Frankfurt and Tuspo Ziegenhain. AGON Sportverlag, Kassel 2005, ISBN 3-89784-244-0 , pp. 248-250.
- Ulrich Matheja: Schlappekicker and sky striker. The story of Eintracht Frankfurt. Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 3-89533-538-X , p. 11 ff.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Location of the Sandhöfer Wiesen sports complex
- ↑ Season 15/16 KLA Frankfurt. Retrieved January 4, 2017 .
- ↑ Location of the Mainwasen sports complex