February 21 – Tickets have gone on sale for what will be one of the oldest historical match-ups in world football history. Sheffield FC, the world’s oldest football club (founded in 1857) will play First Vienna Football Club 1894, the oldest club in Austria (founded in 1894) on June 1, the night before Austria host England in a pre-Euro warm-up.
The clubs have a combined history of 287 years. Sheffield currently play in the seventh tier of English football, while Vienna play in Austria’s third tier Wiener Stadtliga.
First Vienna are celebrating their 125th anniversary and in keeping with the occasion, tickets will cost €12.50. Discounted tickets will cost €8, while children and youths up to the age of 15 go free.
First Vienna play at the 5,000 capacity Hohe Warte Stadium, though capacity could be extended for this game to 7,400.
The history of FC Vienna is interwoven with an English influence. At the end of the 19th century Baron Nathaniel Mayer Anselm Rothschild owned a magnificent complex of garden houses on what is nowadays Hohe Warte in Vienna’s 19th district. Franz Joli, the son of Rothschild’s garden inspector, returned in the mid-1890s from a several-year study trip to the British Isles and institutionalised the game of football among the gardeners.
The gardens of the Hohe Warte were where the Joli brothers challenged William Beale and James Black, two British gardeners, to a game. “By the third day, the whole gardening staff was already obsessed,” reported Max Joli, Franz’s brother. “Like a pack of hounds, they ran after the football every day after work until nightfall.”
What better way to spend a summer evening in Vienna than a stroll through one of the city’s most historic districts to watch a football match between two of the oldest clubs in the world. There will even be beer.
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