When it comes to Europe’s greatest football leagues, Germany’s Bundesliga is an elite coalition of clubs. It consistently grooms top talent, and clubs like Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund regularly appear in the UEFA Champions League, which features top clubs from Spain’s La Liga, Italy’s Serie A, and the UK’s Premier League.
However, in the Austrian Bundesliga, football fans have less to chew on. For decades, the league’s top competition has been based in the capital of Vienna. Only recently have other clubs shifted this dynamic, such as SV Austria Salzburg.
Red Bull’s overhaul of SV Austria Salzburg has revitalized a competitive, big-money streak in the Austrian Bundesliga, and this has reinvigorated public interest. However, top sportsbooks like Unibet focus on the German Bundesliga rather than its Austrian counterpart. SV Austria Salzburg has a long way to go before it’s pulling in any wagers like Bayern Munich—or even Paderborn.
Structure of Austrian and German leagues
The Austrian Bundesliga, known for sponsorship reasons as Tipico Bundesliga, consists of 12 teams. Each team plays every other team in the league four times: two games at their home stadium and two away.
The team with the worst record is relegated to Austria’s second-tier of football, and the top team from the second-tier league joins the Tipico Bundesliga. The two top-performing teams from the Austrian Bundesliga move to qualifying rounds for the Champions League, while two more are up for the Europa League.
The (German) Bundesliga comprises 18 teams. Each team will play another team twice: one game at their home stadium and one away. Season records determine a champion at the end of the season, just like in Austria, but the top four clubs in the Bundesliga advance automatically to the Champions League.
The difference in the calibre of talent in both leagues
When it comes to talented clubs in both the German and Austrian Bundesliga, each league has a deceptively small pool of competition. This means that the margins for success are slim outside of two or three dominating clubs in each league.
In the German Bundesliga, Bayern Munich has a monopoly on the league. Not only have they won 29 titles and been runners-up ten times, but their closest competition is Borussia Dortmund, which has a total record of five titles and seven runners-up titles.
For this reason, top talents in the Bundesliga usually end up in a Bayern uniform. While Borussia Dortmund is far from an inferior team and has a larger, more vibrant fan base, Bayern Munich has stronger sponsorship opportunities given their association with champion titles. This means there’s a funnel of talent and financial resources that leads straight to Munich.
The Austrian Bundesliga has a similar legacy of dynastic reigns. The league’s two strongest teams have been the Vienna-based Rapid Wien and Austria Wien. Respectively, these teams have 32 and 24 titles, with 26 and 19 runners-up awards.
Since the league’s restructuring in the early 90s, both clubs have split talent and notoriety in the Austrian league. However, Red Bull purchased club SV Salzburg in 2005 and since then, the company has done a complete overhaul—from players to staff, to aesthetic branding.
Following this refurbishment in the mid-2000s, SV Salzburg has taken the Austrian Bundesliga ten times. In fact, they’ve taken the champion title consecutively since the 2013-14 season.
From that moment onward, the Austrian Bundesliga has taken dramatic steps to prevent a Bayern Munich-esque club domination from occurring in their domestic league.
Now, the league has been reformatted to allow teams two rounds of competition, divided between the fall and the spring. Teams that normally drift in the middle of the league’s pack now have tighter competition against one another, with the possibility of moving on the Europa League if they can’t qualify for the Champions League.
In the coming years, fans will see if the Austrian Bundesliga has successfully addressed what many recognized as the ‘Bayern-Munich problem’ in the Austrian domestic league.
