Dionys Schönecker

Dionys Schönecker (29 April 1888 – 14 September 1938) was an Austrian footballer and coach, who oversaw Rapid Wien for 15 years, from 1910 until 1925. He also managed the Austrian national team in a single match in 1914.

Early life Dionys Schönecker was born in Vienna on 29 April 1888 as the son of a factory worker. He completed an apprenticeship as a typesetter and worked in the Steyrermühl paper factory. Unlike his brother, Dionys did not establish himself as an important footballer. After playing a few matches in Rapid's first team, and after a short loan to Wiener Sportklub, he retired in 1910, at the age of 22, and went on to become the youngest manager in the history of the club.

Despite taking charge of the club during this difficult phase, the 22-year-old typesetter Schönecker took courage, made a virtue of necessity and saved Rapid by using the players from the youth department to build a new team around Josef Brandstetter and "Rigo" Kuthan, whose sister Emilie he would later marry. In addition to his intuition to focus on the development of young players, Schönecker also adopted a new game scheme, the so-called Kombinationsspiel, made up of short and fast passes, which replaced the old "Kick and rush" (literally: "football and running"), and thus was born the "Viennese school", which in the following years produced some of the most successful teams on the European continent. Bauer is still the most successful coach in the club's history.

Schönecker remained the dominant man in the club as the leader of the football section until September 1938, when after suffering from appendicitis, the 50-year-old was operated on, but still died a few days later on 14 September.

Management style His management style was often described as authoritarian, almost dictatorial, and when there were disciplinary problems with a player, the offending player was often quickly thrown out, with a famous example of this being Josef Bican in 1935, since he was not used to compromising even with the strongest players of the time. The statue of Dionys Schönecker still stands outside the old Pfarrwiese ground, surviving the transition from Gerhard-Hanappi-Stadion to Allianz.