Austria 5-0 Hungary: Europe’s First International Without a British Team (1902)

The Football Documentary Channel · Published 12 October 2026

Austria 5-0 Hungary: Europe’s First International Without a British Team (1902)

Austria 5-0 Hungary was played at the WAC-Platz in Vienna on Sunday 12 October 1902, and both countries now count it as their first international, the start of what became one of the game’s most-played rivalries. It was the first international staged on the European continent, and the first anywhere in Europe with no British side involved. Five hundred people turned up. The Englishman Roland Shires refereed, Josef Taurer scored inside five minutes, and a 19-year-old called Johann Studnicka took three of the five. Argentina had beaten Uruguay 6-0 in Montevideo 84 days earlier, which narrows the claim.

The posters that day advertised Vienna against Budapest rather than two countries, and the men who put the match on had good reason to frame it that way.

A City Match That Two Countries Later Claimed

Vienna Against Budapest, on the Poster and in the Ledgers

Nobody in the Prater that Sunday thought they were watching two countries. The Osterreichische Fussball-Union, the body the OeFB replaced in 1904, staged the match as a city match, Vienna against Budapest, which is how a fixture inside the Austro-Hungarian monarchy could be put on without anyone deciding what a country was. The sides are still listed under the names they carried that day, a Vienna selection and a Budapest selection.

The paperwork caught up slowly. The first ten meetings were city selections, folded into the international statistics only later, and the first match actually announced as Austria against Hungary was the eleventh, in Budapest on 1 November 1908. What settles 12 October 1902 as the starting point is that the two football associations picked the sides themselves. Hungary’s had existed since 19 January 1901; Austria’s was the Osterreichische Fussball-Union, replaced by the OeFB in 1904.

Austria 5-0 Hungary, Goal by Goal, With Three Minutes Missing

Only two of the goal times survive. Josef Taurer scored on five minutes, Studnicka made it 2-0 on ten, and for the last three the running score and the scorer are recorded but the minute is not. Studnicka took it to 3-0, Huber to 4-0, and Studnicka finished at 5-0. Half-time was 3-0, which places three of the five before the interval. The missing minutes are left blank rather than filled with guesses.

Six WAC Men, All Three Scorers, and a Team Sheet of Aliases

The Austrian line-up looked less like a country than a club with guests. Six of the eleven were Wiener Athletiksport-Club players, on WAC’s own ground, and the three men who scored all five goals were among them. The rest came from First Vienna, the Vienna Cricket and Football Club, SC Graphia, Wiener FC 1898 and a youth side from Wahring. Hungary drew three from Budapesti Torna Club and three from Ferencvaros.

Two of the Austrians were listed under invented names, Wilhelm Eipeldauer as Eipel and the captain Emil Wachuda as Omlady, to dodge the punishments waiting for schoolboys caught playing in clubs. The unofficial Austria side that beat a Switzerland team 4-0 in Vienna on 8 April 1901 had gone further, some players wearing wigs and false beards to avoid recognition. Studnicka appeared under the familiar form of his name, Johann “Jan” Studnicka, not a disguise.

He had a reason to remember the date beyond the hat-trick. He turned 19 that afternoon, going by the 12 October 1883 birth date most records carry; one puts it five days earlier, so whether the match fell exactly on his birthday is not quite settled, even if his age is. He finished with 28 caps and 18 goals for Austria and a WAC career running from 1897 to 1920.

The First Without Britain, and the 84 Days That Narrow It

Montevideo Got There in July

The claim that travels with this match is the grand one: the first international anywhere staged without a British team, the first meeting of two non-British national sides. Half of that holds. It was the first on the European mainland. It was not the first anywhere.

Uruguay and Argentina had met for the first time on 20 July 1902, at Albion FC’s ground in Montevideo, where Argentina won 6-0. That friendly opens both countries’ international records, with nothing before it. Vienna came 84 days afterwards. The defensible claim is the narrower one, the first international played in mainland Europe with no British team involved.

The international match was not yet thirty years old in October 1902; the first of all, a goalless friendly between Scotland and England at Partick, had been played on 30 November 1872. Montevideo broke the British monopoly on international football that July, and Vienna followed in October. The fixture born that day went on to become the second most-played international of all, 137 matches up to 14 June 2016, behind only Argentina against Uruguay. The two most-repeated fixtures in the game both began in 1902, in different hemispheres, 84 days apart.

Hajos, Gillemot and the Four Who Stayed at Home

Hungary took the whole thing rather less seriously than posterity has. Four of the selected players withdrew, for no reason beyond how little the match seemed to matter at home, and the eleven who travelled lost 5-0 in front of 500 people. The man who picked them was Ferenc Gillemot, the first szovetsegi kapitany, who assembled that first official Hungary side.

Alfred Hajos captained Hungary from the forward line, already the country’s first Olympic champion. Six years before the Prater he had won two swimming titles at the 1896 Athens Olympics, the 100 metres freestyle in 1 minute 22.2 seconds and the 1200 metres freestyle in 18 minutes 22.2 seconds, before a later career as an architect. He then filed the match report himself, which is one way to control the story of your own defeat.

Neither association put a marker down that day. Austria did not formally exist as a football nation until the OeFB was founded in 1904. Six years later, on 1 November 1908, the two met under their own names in Budapest, and the run of Vienna-against-Budapest matches before it was quietly reclassified as international football. A match nobody billed as Austria against Hungary is now the first line of both countries’ records.

READ MORE: More fixtures that have been played more often than anyone remembers, in our Football Rivalries series →

Austria 5-0 Hungary (1902)

Five hundred people in a Vienna park, a match advertised as two cities, an English referee, two Austrians under false names and a hat-trick scorer who may or may not have been celebrating his birthday. Both federations took years to admit what it had been, and describing it properly takes one correction: the first international on this continent, rather than the first anywhere. Reputations that need checking recur throughout our On This Day series, and Football Rivalries follows the fixtures that never stop being played.

Sources: ORF, RSSSF, MLSZ, AUF, M4 Sport, Puskas Institute, Wien Geschichte Wiki, Transfermarkt, Olympedia, International Swimming Hall of Fame, Nemzeti Sport.