We follow-up our Lost Champions of Austria post from earlier this week with its companion Lost Champions Reimagined feature. If you haven’t seen previous editions, here is where we imagine the strips each of our extinct former national champions might sport in the contemporary age were they to be resurrected, or indeed had stuck around in the first place.

The illustrations you see here draw upon historical precedent of colours and styles and we have assigned contemporary sponsors that historically or geographically reference each club’s past wherever possible.

Wiener AC take on the ‘Pioneers Festival’ as their shirt sponsors. This is an annual entrepreneurial conference held in the city aimed at helping start-up companies. Vienna is a big conference city so its biggest capacity venue, the Austria Centre, takes an involvement in football too and puts its name on the SC Wacker Wien shirt.

Wiener AF goes down the big pharma route with Basalt and we thought it only natural that Jewish club Hakoah Wien would have an obviously Israeli connection – thus El-Al Airlines. Vienna’s final lost champion, SK Admira Wien, resumes its partnership with something of a heritage sponsor. EVN is a major Austrian energy supplier that used to be known as ESV. Some decades ago when Admira was still active, ESV was its major sponsor and in the early 60s the club even played under the name of  ESV Admira-Northeast Energy Vienna. We thought it apt the pair rekindle their former association.

We’ve taken the same approach with former 70s powerhouse VOEST Linz. The club started its days as a works team for the public VOEST steel works and as they are reimagined under their old name, we could only ever nominate Voestalpine (as VOEST is now called) as their headline sponsor.

To the Tyrolean region and the city of Innsbruck with its four extinct former champions. No prizes for guessing that FC Swarovski Tirol will rekindle its association with the Svarovski crystal and jewellery company after 23 years. The city’s other three ex- champion clubs adopt a trio of the city’s major commercial institutions as sponsors: from energy (Wacker Innsbruck), banking (SSW Innsbruck) and road traffic technologies (FC Tirol Innsbruck).

BTLM writes the words and the wonderful shirt designs are created for us by Chris Oakley. Please do visit his essential Kitbliss site. Click any of the images in the galley below to enlarge.