FOR THE first time since we happened upon Austria Salzburg’s table-topping antics, Leeds United at last have an enviable lead over their promotion rivals too. But as we gorged ourselves on Leeds’ festive frolics, the Austrian winter break meant all they could do was cast an awestruck gaze in our direction while thinking about putting up those bloody shelves, just as the missus was promised sodding ages ago.

In October, with the winter nights drawing in, Austria Salzburg locked horns with PSV, the side they endured a brief fling with as a consequence of their rejection of Red Bull’s rebranding in 2005. Their support was initially welcomed by PSV, only to be shunned just days after it had supplied the impetus to avert a near-certain relegation. After three consecutive promotions from as low as the Austrian game goes, those same dedicated souls were merciless in thrashing the backstabbers by six goals to nil.

The term had begun quietly with a home friendly against Notts County back in July, when even less was fathomable about that particular club’s ownership than it is now. Who would’ve guessed that they were about to attract the corrosive influence of Sven-Goran Eriksson? Or that Sol Campbell would’ve seen through it all after a just one game? And who could’ve known that the funny little glyph underpinning the club’s brand new badge was in fact the logo of its holding company?

It’s precisely the sort of crass ownership stunt Austria Salzburg stand against – and please, if it is somehow legal in the English game (and my query on the matter remains unanswered by the Football League), nobody but nobody tell Ken Bates. That’s assuming, of course, that Forward Sports Fund really are more than just the sort of individual The Members once described “sitting at a desk with a plaque outside on the wall,” and actually have a logo of some description.

Anyway, where was I? Ah, yes. Football.

Held under a roof on a squeaky floor, the 2010 Salzburger Stier might not be as important as the outdoor game, but the tournament – played before a baying mob of beered-up blokes – which concludes today neatly overlaps its seasonal British equivalent: darts. And as everybody knows, darts is precisely what the new year’s all about.

It’ll be the end of March before Austria Salzburg resume a 4th division season in which 12 wins from 15 games has placed them 5 points clear at the top, so their intrepid fans will just have to wait until the resumption of what, in Waddellian terms, is the greatest comeback since Lazarus.

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WHEN Dieter Mateschitz unveiled Red Bull Salzburg in June 2005 flanked by his private aircraft collection, there was no doubt that the club had become nothing more than another branch of his firm’s forays into novelty sports events such as skydiving, wakeboarding and Formula 1. There stood 11 walking billboards for a drink: red and white strips for home games with all blue when playing away from a ground tackily refitted with laser lighting rigs and a “supersonic” sound system.

The insensitivity shown to Austria Salzburg’s identity alienated swathes of supporters, some of whom were further outraged at being denied entry to a pre-season friendly merely for wearing their traditional colours. “The red bull can’t be violet, or else we couldn’t call it Red Bull,” went Mateschitz’s response. “This is a new club with no history.”

Despite a successful start on the field, the club’s most dedicated fans moved quickly to safeguard its discarded past. Today, those who had egged-on the young Martin Hiden in the 90s are more likely to be found on the sidelines of Austria’s village greens than at Red Bull’s temple of mammon.

To the refrain of “scheisse Red Bull!” and backed by unprecedented terrace solidarity from fans of many European clubs, the Initiative Violett-Weiss – an alliance of Austria Salzburg’s 20 or so supporters’ groups – attempted to reason with Red Bull on the issue of colour. The firm filibustered, dismissing public objections to their takeover as hooliganism. During a home game against Austria Vienna, 1,000 pro-violet supporters noisily exited the stadium through a choking violet fug at precisely 19.33, the year of Austria Salzburg’s foundation. Vowing only to return with their resurrected club, the bearers of 76 years of Austria Salzburg’s history are now sitting on top of the fourth division: the halfway stage of their epic journey back to the Bundesliga.

It’s not been easy. Their small community has suffered the loss of its grandstand to fire, and the life of young ultra Gerhard Weiss on a coach trip to visit a group of sympathetic fans of Borussia Dortmund. Those who Red Bull termed a “violent group of so-called fans” have welcomed supporters from all over Europe to Salzburg’s violet quarter. The demands of having a four-figure crowd in tow everywhere they go may present challenges to rural venues, but there’s more danger of being duped by tall tales about Martin Hiden’s supposed appetite for ham than anything else. In fact, the most violent act I’ve witnessed there was a bloke getting heartily slapped by his girlfriend.

Well, he probably asked for it – which is more than most football supporters do as the institutions we sustain with noise and with colour are bought and sold with increasingly frequency. Without our traditions, our culture, the lives we live and lend to our clubs, what would they be? What’s left when clubs exist for the benefit of those other than their supporters? In the third division, with ownership a mystery and Thorp Arch left unbought while plans for a commercial development estimated to cost over £80m sit on the drawing board, the endeavours of Austria Salzburg’s supporters is a timely reaffirmation of what we Leeds United fans already know: always question the motives of those running our club even when it’s on a roll. In fact, especially when it’s on a roll.

As for the only man to wear the all-white of Leeds United and the violet of Austria Salzburg, 36-year old Martin Hiden last year became the world’s first carbon neutral footballer (whatever that means), adding a righteous splash of green to an already extensive palette for one of the game’s least likely colourful characters.

This article appears in issue 4 of The Square Ball Magazine. Out now, only £1.

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WHEN George Graham checked behind the ears of the defender he’d bought from Rapid Vienna in February 1998, everything seemed to be as advertised. Within days, Martin Hiden slotted straight into one of his stoic yet occasionally engaging Leeds United line-ups on an afternoon it was neither: defeated by a single goal at home to Southampton. Nevertheless, the new acquisition settled in and was present at some memorable on-days (5-0 at Derby County) as well as some forgettable off-ones (0-1 at home to Wolves in the FA Cup).

Homesickness, however, was soon to become a worry for Hiden. English football’s only other Austrian, Alex Manninger, kept goal 200 miles away and much worse: no matter where he looked, it seemed that nowhere in West Yorkshire sold speck, a peculiarly Austrian sort of salt-cured ham. Bruno Ribeiro told him about a shop in Harrogate that stocked chorizo, but it simply wouldn’t do. Nothing could replace the distinctive juniper flavours of his favourite brand of speck, and in the depths of despair he reached for the bottle.

Summer brought the first indication to George Graham that all was not how it seemed with his £1.3m man: when the once brown-haired Hiden turned up for pre-season training with a brightly bleached barnet. If there’s one thing Graham hated, it was peroxide. So much so, that Hiden’s roots were barely showing when the man who once frogmarched freshly-blonded Lee Sharpe and Jonathan Woodgate back to the barbers by their ear holes walked himself all the way down the M1 to Spurs.

Hiden’s experiments soon left him with a bonce so red it resembled David Hopkin’s as seen through a pair of infrared goggles. Then, in a cruel twist of fate, a pothole in the turf of that club who wear the same disgusting colour ended his Leeds career. With a sore arse from the treatment table, Hiden eventually skulked back to his homeland; his hair a footnote in Leeds United’s history yet, it turns out, a token of the chameleonic nature of Austrian football.

Believe it or not, Hiden still plays in the Austrian Bundesliga. With revenues a fraction of those enjoyed by the other one in neighbouring Germany, it’s a grotesquely commercialised league. Playing kits are pockmarked with logos and the turnover of sponsors buries clubs beneath a colourful array of names and motifs. The games of hide and seek played with identity suits sponsors more than clubs, and some deals are more intrusive than others.

Take one of Hiden’s former clubs, for instance. Austria Salzburg were known officially as Casino Salzburg for a decade until an insurance firm, Wüstenrot, lent their name to the club in 1997. Throughout this period, the club wore its traditional hues of violet and white – until, that is, the hangover from a mid-90s purple patch that brought three Bundesliga titles and a UEFA Cup kicked in with a bang.

Amid cash concerns in the second half of the 2004/05 season, top flight survival was secured and Red Bull owner Dieter Mateschitz stated his intention to rescue the club. Outgoing chairman Rudi Quehenberger expressed his delight that “years of hard work for the benefit of football in Salzburg” had come to fruition, and the local company’s investment was roundly applauded. The strugglers suddenly became favourites for the title, but it quickly emerged that in brokering a deal with the energy drink firm, the club had sold its soul to the devil.

This article concludes here and appears in issue 4 of The Square Ball Magazine. Out now, only £1.

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WHILE following the story of Austria Salzburg these last four years, our pals at Fanclub Absolut have been an indispensable source of news and inspiration.

Formed in 1994, Absolut are amongst the oldest of twenty or so such groups which made up the 1,000 souls that walked out on their bastardised football club in 2005 to form the backbone of a new, real one.

Twice, they have generously accommodated our ill-advised attempts to survive a whole weekend in Salzburg on an authentic Austrian diet of beer, cabbage and extruded meat products.

They have introduced us to the club’s countless colourful characters as well as some quaint local customs, such as disgustedly throwing pints of red wine and coke into a bush because – unlike the mighty Stiegl – it’s “un-Austrian”.

So when they asked for assistance in designing a brand new banner a few weeks ago, it was the very least I could do. As if to prove there’s more than just Gill Sans in the type drawer (more on Eric Gill some other time – let’s save him for a rainy day), they now have a new logo as well.

I say “new”; if you don’t mention it to Arthur Guinness, neither will I. It received its first airing at top-of-the-table Austria Salzburg’s second five-goal haul of the season a fortnight ago against Hallwang, which just happened to precede another at Piesendorf last weekend. Now’s not really the time to bring up the 3rd round Landescup loss to St. Johann, so better luck in the league against FC Zell am See tomorrow, lads.

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JUST as Bill Hicks’ sadly abbreviated life was getting going came his realisation that what he was doing almost certainly wasn’t worth the effort. “Bear with me,” he’d say with a sigh. “While I plaster on a fake smile and plough through this shit one more time.”

Tell me about it. Four years after conceiving the most detestable side in the Austrian league, three from repeating the trick in America (plus the one in Brazil it’s easy to forget about) and two years after objections from fans and authorities thwarted attempts to buy Leipzig’s FC Sachsen, Red Bull has returned to the city eyeing more vulnerable prey on its impoverished football scene.

Dieter Mateschitz’s latest attraction is a fatal one for the few hundred regulars at suburban fifth division outfit SSV Markranstäd,who he recently acquired with a fraction of the 100m euros he’s pledged to buy Bundesliga football “within 8 years” for the club’s new home, Leipzig’s 45,000 capacity Zentralstadion. The stadium, underused since its construction for five 2006 World Cup fixtures, will get the full Red Bull treatment but for its new tenant there lies in store the biggest contrivance the German game’s seen since Sylvester Stallone saved a last-minute penalty.

Prevented by German football law from owning and rebranding the club outright, a sleight of name will see SSV Markranstäd’s league place taken by Mateshitz’s “RB Leipzig”. That’s “RB” not for “Red Bull” you understand, but “Rasenball Leipzig”. In English? Grassball Leipzig.

Grassball? Riiight. Tell you what, Dieter. I don’t care if you shit Bundesliga titles out of your arse on cue. Just do me a favour: listen to Bill and leave the rest of us to get on with following our football, not fighting it.

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THEY may well be a nation of Tetley’s-thieving bastards with lager they’d only cook with if they were capable of preparing a single dish of culinary note, but centuries spent staring into dancing flame on dark winter nights means that the Danes know a bloody good yarn when the hear one.

After our old friend Schützei had welcomed them to Salzburg, their cameras returned to hear a familiar tale about a rich man who bought an expensive new outfit that would separate the clever from the stupid.

Dieter Mateschitz’s intention upon purchase of Austria Salzburg in 2005 was to see his rebranded club compete regularly in the Champions League. Come next season, the chances are that he’ll find himself, once again, with nothing on.

As long as Austria Salzburg’s progress befits their fans’ inspirational drone, it’s that little bit easier for supporters of the club whose history, colours and tradition Red Bull binned to remain sanguine in the face of the local firm’s arrogance.

Once the formality of defeating Adnet on Saturday was realised, their most gruelling season yet got its fairy tale ending with two games to spare. Fans lit the celebratory fuse, and talismanic centre-forward Oliver Trappl rocked the mic before seeing in a third successive league title the only way he knows how.

Prost!

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HE’S got a lot to answer for, has that bloody Pete Winkelman. Had he not relocated, renamed and rebadged hard-up Wimbledon to Milton Keynes in 2002, there would have been no need for its fan led off-shoot, meaning supporters of Austria Salzburg might have embraced the stench of Red Bull’s Pepé Le Pew-style advances on their club and this blog, dear reader, might never have existed.

Also, had his “footballing frenzy waiting to happen” not staged the final act in a month of defeats for Gary McAllister’s Beckfordless line-ups, Leeds United’s path may have differed from the one that has the potential for us to sink our hat-pin of history into his ballooning bastard brainchild.

Play off pain for MK would leave the protection of just a single division from AFC Wimbledon. Their footsteps may not yet be audible to Bundesliga leaders Red Bull, but Austria Salzburg are also marching on their oppressors with quickening pace.

Despite the necessity to squeeze in the odd midweek match (die Englische Woche, they call it), form since the winter break has been nothing short of what we’ve come to expect. Berndorf and Oberhofen were mercilessly thrashed by seven and nine goals, and two was all it took to snuff out Kuchl’s challenge before a last-minute third nicked a slapstick affair fit for Plainfeld’s shambolic surroundings.

Last weekend’s retributional 5-1 flailing of Bürmoos – the only side to inflict them with defeat this season – means that when second-placed Grünau visit on the final day in four games’ time, the odds are that a third successive title trophy will be brimming with cold Stiegl and draped once more in violet and white.

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IN A recent address at the Supporters’ Direct Annual Conference, author David Goldblatt quickly got down to brass tacks.

What is a football club? It sure as hell isn’t the stadium, because you can move. It’s not the players, because increasingly none of them are bound to clubs for very long. Managers come and go, directors come and go, coaches come and go.

What actually remains at the core of these institutions that gives them life over a period of time are their fans, but above all it is the common culture that these fans have generated.”

Too true, but rather than being the source of great strength for football supporters, this cultural currency is more often used by clubs against them. Bottled, diluted and flogged back to fans, it’s unwrapped with the same fervour they used to create it in the first place.

Take Leeds United for example. The Members Club, Yorkshire Radio and LUTV are the equivalent of a blanket thrown over a birdcage; all they do is confirm that with ‘You are free… to do as we tell you’, Bill Hicks was right, as usual.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Following Goldblatt to the stage was Hamburg SV supporter Oliver Scheel with a smack in the chops for anyone who believes that a good membership scheme amounts to little more than discount merchandise and a magazine subscription. He supports a club which offers all the usual platitudes plus something infinitely more desirable.

Each of Hamburg’s 57,000 members has the right to attend the club’s AGM, not only to grill its board of directors, but also to participate in a democratic process which enables a fan to join them at the top table, a seat Scheel presently occupies.

‘Bah, Hamburg!’ you might say. ‘It’ll never work over here.’ And you’d be wrong. Thanks to Supporters’ Direct, we have 45 supporter-directors, as well as 14 fan-owned clubs. Since 2000, the organisation has swelled its ranks to 120,000 members and overseen almost 150 supporters’ trusts, 100 with shareholdings of some sort.

Austria Salzburg are run along similar lines, although one individual who stands – often literally – head and shoulders above the rest achieves his status in a more unorthodox fashion. The man known only as ‘Schützei’ once bounced agelessly before me singing ‘Super Leeds!’ at the top of his voice as if that’s what he always does – because, well, it is.

Schützei’s as big a part of the Austria Salzburg experience as the Ultras’ megaphone, except he requires no amplification whatsoever. From a lofty position (a fence will do, or once – it being Austria – the slopes of a nearby mountain) he commands second half silence from violetten young and old before delivering a bizarre scat-like proposition to a which a hearty ‘AUSTRIA!’ is the unanimous response.

Before they all skidaddled off for der winterpause, the apples of Schützei’s eye swatted rock-bottom St. Georgen to lead the table at the half-way stage, two points above that pesky Kuchl and four clear of Grünau. Suspended until late March is a fascinating three-way struggle for promotion in Austria Salzburg’s most gruelling season yet on their noble ascent from the country’s 7th division.

Until then, the Alpine weather means they’ll somehow have to get by on a measly diet of futsal, safe in the knowledge that they may well be indoors, but they’re certainly not in the dark.

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IN THE grand scheme of things, back-to-back draws aren’t much of a reality check. But on the way to their latest stalemate, Austria Salzburg’s supporters took in the village of Fuschl am See, where lies the corporate nerve centre of a company which, in 1984, adapted a Thai stimulant of which they now sell more than 3 billion cans a year worldwide. In 2005, the same firm bought their ailing football club and placed it in the ranks of other heavily-branded non-entities bearing their drink’s name and colours.

Those who chose to support 11 of Red Bull GmbH’s 4,000 employees have discovered that habitually topping Austria’s Bundesliga is scant consolation for routinely failing to secure salient European exposure for their brand. Those who didn’t have found the path from the country’s basement league, unlike the winding road to Fuschl am See, to be straight and true.

This season, however, the real Austria Salzburg are experiencing some resistance to their progress, with recent draws at Grünau and Strobl and an uncharacteristic away defeat at Bürmoos. Nevertheless, with just Saturday’s home date with as-yet winless St Georgen to go before the winter break, they’re tucked neatly behind Kuchl in second place and alle ist gut.

Since the Austrian fizz magnates unfurled their template in New York with the fanfare ‘We’ve changed the name, now we’re changing the game’, they’ve learned that, just as in Salzburg, old habits die hard and the team formerly known as MetroStars are still the league’s longest-running joke.

When two of their players were recently suspended for doping, one of the deputising soft drink adverts, rookie goalkeeper Danny Cepero, scored an 80-yard free kick on Giants Stadium’s hallucinogenic pitch and football entered new realms of synthesis.

But how ‘real’ is football anyway? If a recent spate of accounts are anything to go by, Eastern ingenuity distorts the game in more than just Salzburg and New York.

In his book, ‘The Fix’, Canadian journalist Declan Hill tells of meetings with Chinese-Malaysian fixers at the 2006 World Cup, focusing on Ghana’s 3-0 loss to Brazil and, hilariously, the failure to fix England’s game with Ecuador because Sven Goran Eriksson’s side weren’t considered good enough to score twice.

More recently, a Spanish judge’s taped Russian boasts that Zenit St Petersburg’s UEFA Cup semi final second leg defeat of Bayern Munich was bought, as well as suggestions that the final – in Manchester, against Rangers – was also compromised, preceded suspicious half time Asian betting patterns on a Championship match at Carrow Road in which Derby goalkeeper Roy Carroll was dismissed and subsequently dropped.

The rise of in-running betting has not only lead to the presence of ’spotters’ in UK grounds exploiting the momentary gap in TV transmission to China by informing syndicates of what’s unfolding by mobile phone, but also the violent Newcastle murder of a Chinese couple known to be recruiting others to beat the Asian bookies.

The object of such obvious market appeal would have to be pretty robust to withstand the temptations money can bring, and we know how flaky the Premier League can be. If it didn’t come over all light-headed around the folding stuff, ‘Grand Slam Sunday’ would be a once in a lifetime event instead of occurring twice a season, West Ham would’ve been relegated for Carlos Tevez’s illegal registration and the likes of Thaksin Shinawatra and Arcadi Gaydamak wouldn’t be allowed to hold stakes in its precious member clubs.

Seeing Garry Cook’s ‘Virgin of Asia’ became the latest side to benefit from Rob Styles’ over-assertive manner in the box, made me wonder what effect the boom in the Premier League’s overseas finance, aided by lax application of the fabled ‘Fit & Proper Persons Test’ and other excuses for governance from Richard Scudamore, has on its integrity.

Was the Professional Match Game Officials Board unprecedented last-minute wholesale changes to so-called ‘Select Group’ appointments recently an indication that whatever familiarity breeds, it ain’t good? And what’s happened to Mark Clattenburg, suspended days before the season fresh from having an expensive-looking hair weave?

Is it really appropriate that in Sky, the Premier League has paymaster, broadcaster and bookkeeper? How can they talk about the global appeal of the Premier League when there’s empty seats when its teams go on tour? Is the real reason that Game 39’s still on the agenda to tap into massive overseas gambling markets, extending Scudamore’s working relationship with those he really ought to be protecting the game from?

Don’t have nightmares, do sleep well.

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HAD Albert Camus been around today, it’s safe to say his life would have taken a very different path. Tuberculosis wouldn’t have put an end to his goalkeeping career, meaning his best-known novel, L’Étranger, would probably have explored the difficulties of adjusting to life after a big money move abroad. Almost certainly, it would have been the wreckage of his luxury motor, and not his publisher’s, from which their bodies would eventually be pulled.

Instead, amongst the many things he leaves behind is as succinct an expression of what makes football tick – real football, not what the likes of Garry Cook and Richard Scudamore talk about – as you’ll find: “All I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football”

To lovers of a game now so pervasive that to follow it – to watch, to consume, even to accept it – requires faith bordering on nihilism, Camus’ expressions of life’s absurdities are a breath of fresh air.

He was big on co-operation, solidarity and effort, was our Albert. He advocated persevering in the face of pain, sticking up for your mates and what you believe in, even if to say so’s fucking boring and there’s no point.

To followers of three-times league champions Austria Salzburg, when the morality of their club was compromised by a hostile takeover from Red Bull, their obligations were obvious. Offered no choice but to go it alone to preserve their club’s name and colours, they embody Camus’ assertion that in life, the pursuit of meaning is the meaning.

Back-to-back promotions mean that those who, almost 15 years ago, wore their violet and white colours to a two-legged UEFA Cup Final against Inter Milan, now don them with comparable pride in Austria’s fifth division, the 2. Landesliga.

Just three weeks after celebrating their latest title with a Spanish holiday, coach Miro Bojceski’s new-look line up opened the season in front of the most magnificent support in non-league football with their first draw in almost two years.

Not the anticipated start, but the recruits quickly gelled; Bosnia-Herzegovinian forward Mersudin Jukic scoring the first in a four-goal win at St Georgen, then setting up each goal in the 5-1 defeat of Golling.

Last season’s top-scorer Mario Schleindl then chipped in with a hat-trick in a 7-1 rout of Plainfeld before Jukic got back in on the act. He scored in consecutive 3-1 wins, over Thalgau and Berndorf, before grabbing four in the 5-1 away drubbing of Oberhofen which saw Austria Salzburg share top spot with Kuchl, who were the next visitors to Maxglan.

1,600 turned up for the top-of-the-table clash and to celebrate Austria Salzburg’s 75th birthday in the only way they know. Fittingly, it was another birthday boy, Nico Meyer, who pierced the tension with both strikes in a 2-0 win which earmarked Kuchl as the biggest threat to violet dominance.

So, eight games in and three points clear, the script of Austria Salzburg’s ascent at the first time of asking looks, this time, like it might take us to the final curtain. But this is football – real football – not theatre. When pushed on which he preferred, Albert Camus spoke for us all when he replied: ‘Football, without hesitation.’

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