Dionys Schönecker

In 1906, Schönecker joined the football section of Sportklub Rapid, at the age of 18, where he initially played in the reserve team and since 1907 in the first team as a right winger. 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.

Saving Rapid

The appointment of a 22-year-old as the main person responsible for sport and business was actually an emergency solution. Rapid was going through a crisis at that time, being on the verge of collapse after having been abandoned by almost all of its players. The management of the heavily indebted club had resigned as a whole, and the majority of the players had also turned their backs on the club. To make the situation even worse, the city of Vienna had canceled the lease for the Rudolfsheim sports field, the area of which was needed to expand the Meiselmarkt, which left Rapid without a home. 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. To the surprise of many, given that until then the team had certainly not shone in terms of results, this young Rapid side won the title in the championship that was held for the first time in 1911–12. 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…

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. As a means to achieve his declared goal of making Rapid the best team in Europe, he subordinated everything, including his players' private lives. However, Schönecker himself sometimes also had disciplinary problems, especially at derbies; for instance, in the scandalous game in 1937 in which, due to injuries and exclusions, there were only 6 Rapid players on the field when the score was 0–5, the referee wisely blew his whistle and Schönecker immediately ran up to him and gave his unprintable opinion, which earned him a hefty fine.

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. Schönecker began playing football together with his older brother Eduard, who appeared for the Austrian national team.