Austria Bundesliga 2026/27 (M)

In 1911 the Austrian championship was still largely a Vienna affair, and Rapid won it. The league as it exists today came much later: the Bundesliga was constituted in 1974, after the Staatsliga and the Nationalliga, and its first season, 1974/75, went to Wacker Innsbruck — the first champion of the modern format.

Rapid have 32 titles and Austria Vienna 24, yet the argument over who gets to be called Rekordmeister is still live, and it has a catch. Count only from 1949/50, when the championship finally covered the whole country, and the scoreline flips: Austria lead 21-16. Both clubs bill themselves as record champions and both have a case, depending on where you start the clock. Behind them sit Salzburg on 17 — three as Austria Salzburg, fourteen since Red Bull bought the club in 2005 — and Wacker/Tirol on 10.

One number from the old days has not moved in nearly half a century: Hans Krankl's 41 goals in 1977/78, seven of them in a single game, Rapid's 11-1 demolition of GAK. The league ran with ten clubs and 36 rounds until 2017; the twelve teams and the split table arrived in 2018/19.

LASK had not won a trophy since 1965. In May 2026 they won two. The cup came first, then the championship — the very double they had pulled off sixty-one years earlier, when they became the first club from outside Vienna to be crowned champions of Austria.

Nothing was to spare. The title went to the final round, on 17 May, LASK winning 3-0 away at Austria Vienna to finish on 39 points against Sturm Graz's 37. The Linz side had climbed there from the wrong end of the table, with Didi Kühbauer in charge since October. Sturm, back-to-back winners in 2024 and 2025, conceded fewer than anyone — 35 goals — and still came up two points short.

The rest of the season was a series of corrections. Salzburg finished third on 29 points, their lowest placing in over a decade, with Austria Vienna fourth on the same tally. Sturm's Otar Kiteishvili was top scorer with 15. Blau-Weiß Linz went down as the bottom club of the relegation group on 21 points. And Rapid rescued their European place in the play-off: beaten 2-1 at Ried, 3-0 winners at home on 25 May, 4-2 on aggregate.

One up, one down. Austria Lustenau return to the top flight two years after dropping out of it, as 2. Liga champions, taking the place of Blau-Weiß Linz. The twelve clubs are otherwise unchanged, and the calendar runs from 31 July 2026 to 17 May 2027, with a six-week winter break that ends on 22 January.

LASK defend with the coach who won it, which in Linz has not been the habit. Sturm Graz stand across from them as the most consistent challenger of recent years and the side that has had to change least. Salzburg arrive mid-rebuild: Daniel Beichler was dismissed and Danny Röhl hired on 17 June, charged with returning the Red Bull Arena to a position it has spent most of its recent history treating as its own. Two more dugouts changed hands as well — Markus Schopp at Hartberg, Mario Despotović at Ried.

The two Vienna clubs are the unknown. Austria finished fourth and Rapid fifth, and they meet twice before the split: on 30 October in Favoriten and on 29 January in Hütteldorf, with the whole winter in between.

What changes in 2026/27 is not the field, it is the arithmetic. Since 2018 the league had cut the table in two and then halved every point earned along the way. On 15 October 2025 the clubs voted unanimously to scrap that, and the deal runs for four seasons, to 2029/30. For the first time in eight years, a point won in August is worth in May exactly what a point won in April is worth.

The shape stays. Twenty-two rounds home and away and then the table is sliced down the middle: the top six into the title group, the bottom six into the relegation group. Each group plays its own home-and-away mini-league, ten more matches, thirty-two in all. The detail the reform quietly removes: the halving rounded down, and the club docked that half point was handed the tiebreak advantage in return.

At the bottom only one club goes down, last in the relegation group, and the 2. Liga champion comes straight up if it holds a licence; the play-off exists purely for that administrative case. At the top there are four European tickets and none of them is generous: Austria sit seventeenth in the UEFA coefficient, so not even the champion reaches a league phase — they start in the Champions League second qualifying round, the runner-up and the play-off winner in the Conference League second qualifying round, and the cup winner in the first qualifying round of the Europa League.