Club ProfileAnnex

Profile — Facts, Figures and Milestones

1. FC Union Berlin (officially: 1. Fußballclub Union Berlin e. V.) is a football club based in Berlin-Köpenick. Its founding history is complicated. In 1906, in Luisenstraße (today's Plönzeile), ball boys and friends of the local club Excelsior gathered in a sandpit behind the Oberschöneweide school and founded the football club Olympia. The club dissolved shortly after, but some football enthusiasts from the same circle soon formed a new club, modelled on the neighbouring Lichtenberger S.C. Frisch Auf. Excelsior split into Preußen and Vorwärts, but neither offshoot lasted long.

Ultimately, members of all three clubs came together and on June 17, 1906, founded Olympia Oberschöneweide at the "Großkopf" tavern in Luisenstraße 17. The team initially consisted almost entirely of schoolboys and joined BTuFC Helgoland 1897 as a youth team barely a month later. The club was not very successful, so the Oberschöneweide players decided to switch again just six months later. This time they attached themselves to the 1905 German Football Champions — BTuFC Union 1892. There the team played for two years — albeit only as the fourth team. In the 1907/08 season, they achieved their first modest success by winning the championship of the lowest division of the Berlin Ball Sports Association (VBB). In February 1909, the team separated from BTuFC. They wanted to stand on their own feet. Out of gratitude and loyalty, they adopted both the name (henceforth calling themselves Union Oberschöneweide, later with the prefix SC) and the club colours blue and white.

Three years later, in the 1909/10 season, the Berliners first competed as an independent club in the VBB — quite successfully. After three promotions in five years, the club played in Berlin and Brandenburg's top division from 1914. In the new league of the Brandenburg Ball Sports Association, Union even became runners-up in 1917.

The team played for nearly ten years at a sports ground on Wattstraße in Oberschöneweide, until the 1920 move to the Sadowa sports complex — today's Stadion An der Alten Försterei — in the Wuhlheide forest. For the official opening ceremony on August 7, 1920, the reigning German champions 1. FC Nürnberg visited. In 1920, Union became Berlin champions for the first time and qualified for the German championship final round. They reached the quarter-finals and narrowly lost 2-3 to Vereinigte Breslauer Sportfreunde. In 1923, the club became Berlin champions again and, after victories over Arminia Bielefeld and SpVgg Fürth, made it all the way to the championship final. At the Grunewald Stadium in Berlin, Union lost their "home match" 0-3 against Hamburger SV in front of 64,000 spectators. The early heyday of "Union-Ob." — as fans called the club — came to an end.