History
The club's roots can be traced back SG Glaucha in Soviet-occupied East Germany, which was founded in 1946, only a year after the Second World War hand ended. SG Glaucha in turn, centered around the core of Hallescher Fußball-Club Wacker which was already founded in 1900. Wacker had participated in the playoff rounds for the German championship in 1921, 1928, and 1934, when it won the Gauliga Mitte.
As was common in the East at the time, the club would undergo frequent name changes, the first one was to SG Freiimfelde Halle in 1948. In the following year they won the eastern championship as ZSG Union Halle and repeated this success in 1952.
A succession of further name changes followed: BSG Turbine Halle (1953); SC Chemie Halle-Leuna (1957); SC Chemie Halle (1958); and finally FC Chemie Halle (1966).
The last name change reflects the separation of football departments from their parent sports clubs all across East Germany, forming football clubs, as sports bureaucrats strove to build a powerful national football team. As BSG Turbine Halle the side won its first East German Cup in 1956, and a second one in 1962, this time as SC Chemie Halle. The club played in the premier DDR-Oberliga as a middling side, with the occasional lapse that would drop them to the second tier DDR-Liga. Their best result in this period was third place Oberliga finish in 1970–71 that earned them a first-round UEFA Cup appearance. In 1991, after the last season of the DDR-Oberliga, they were placed 10th in the All-time DDR-Oberliga table. The club had also formed a significant number of players for the East Germany national football team, such as Dariusz Wosz and Bernd Bransch.
With German reunification in 1990, and the merger of the country's eastern and western leagues, the club entered the 2.Bundesliga as Hallescher FC, the second highest all-German league. However, a lot of important former players had already left the club for Western German or other European clubs and therefore in the 1991-1992 season, they finished second to last. Followings this, they were relegated to the NOFV-Oberliga. However, this was only the beginning of a steady decline that followed and the club descended down until Verbandsliga Sachsen-Anhalt (fifth level league) by the 1995–96 season. The 1999-2000 season was a turning point for Halle, they finally returned to the NOFV-Oberliga where they stayed until 2008. In 2007, Sven Köhler became the team's manager and managed to secure a first place in the NOFV-Oberliga Süd 2007–2008. Hallscher FC was promoted to the Regionalliga Nord. They surprisingly finished their first Regionalliga season as a runner-up and only narrowly missed their second promotion within only two seasons. Finally, in the 2011–12 season, Hallescher FC managed to succeed in a neck-and-neck race with Holstein Kiel and RB Leipzig and was able to secure the first place. This meant a direct qualification for the 3. Liga and marked their return to a professional football league after a 20 year absence.
Read more about this topic: Hallescher FC
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It is true that this man was nothing but an elemental force in motion, directed and rendered more effective by extreme cunning and by a relentless tactical clairvoyance .... Hitler was history in its purest form.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)