When Red Bull bought Salzburg's football club and declared it had no history
After the energy drink company took over Austria Salzburg in 2005, its owner announced a new club with no history, scrapped the traditional violet for red and white, and offered fans violet only on the goalkeeper's away socks. Furious supporters walked out and founded their own club. The rebranded team then dominated Austrian football.
The original club formed on 13 September 1933 from a merger of two city sides, Hertha and Rapid. It reached the top division in 1953 and played for years under sponsors' names, first SV Casino Salzburg and later SV Wüstenrot Salzburg, while fans kept calling it Austria Salzburg. Its golden spell came in the 1990s: three league titles in four seasons and a run to the 1994 UEFA Cup final, lost 1–0 in both legs to Inter Milan.
Dietrich Mateschitz's company bought the club on 6 April 2005 and rewrote its rules so that a Red Bull subsidiary alone controlled the board. The club website even claimed a 2005 founding date until the Austrian Football Association made it remove the claim; the history back to 1933 was later restored. Talks with traditional supporters collapsed in September 2005, splitting fans into the Red-Whites and the Violet-Whites, who launched a new SV Austria Salzburg. Several fan groups across Europe backed them as a stand against the commercialisation of football.
Red Bull hired Giovanni Trapattoni and Lothar Matthäus as joint coaches in 2006 and won the 2006–07 title with five games to spare. From 2014 to 2023 Salzburg won ten league titles in a row. Along the way it became a talent factory, earning roughly €300 million from sales between 2013 and 2019, including Sadio Mané and Erling Haaland.
In 2009 Red Bull also bought an amateur club in Leipzig and renamed it RasenBallsport to sidestep rules on corporate names, and players flowed between the two. Because of sponsorship restrictions, Salzburg plays as FC Salzburg with an altered crest in FIFA and UEFA competitions.
Source: FC Red Bull Salzburg
