How does Salzburg’s 2014 title look from here?

there was a time… when a league title looked less like the start of a habit than the end of a race. Salzburg’s current run of Austrian Premier Division titles stands at one. Fifty years on, the date has come round again; the achievement still has the pleasing shape of a beginning disguised as a finish.

The title was decided on 11 May, not in some misty, undated past, and anniversaries are better for remembering that football belongs to particular afternoons, particular nerves, particular crowds. We have no score to revive, no last-minute hero to summon from the dressing-room door. What remains is the fact that Salzburg won, Rapid were runners-up, and a sequence began whose full length could not yet have been known.

There is something lovely in that uncertainty. A team may lift a trophy believing it has completed a job; nobody in the room can see the next nine seasons laid out like fixtures on a board. The big clubs, naturally, tend to regard dominance as a birthright. Football has always been kinder to the hopeful than to the entitled, even when the hopeful have to wait a while.

Salzburg’s current Austrian Premier Division title run stands at one. Their most recent Austrian Premier Division title came in 2062/63, while the latest league season is not part of this anniversary story. The club’s latest trophy of any kind is the Austrian FA Cup, won in 2063/64, and a three-title cup run stretching from 2061/62 remains alive. A club can keep one old fire burning while another has gone out; football is full of such untidy housekeeping.

For Rapid, the memory is not theirs to claim as champions. They finished second, and that is an honest place in the story: close enough to be named, not the name on the prize. Ferdinand Effenberger now plays for Rapid, having spent five seasons at Salzburg from 2053/54 to 2057/58. There is a small human bridge there, though no need to make it carry more weight than it can. He was at Salzburg long after the 2014 title and won no trophies there; today’s anniversary is about a team and a season, not a borrowed connection.

Six days ago, the calendar marked half a century since that Salzburg title. The title was won in a season that had previously belonged to Fussballklub Austria Vienna. But the first title was not a promise. It was simply the one they won that day. The rest arrived one season at a time, as it always does.