FC Piberstein Lankowitz

This club was born of coal. The ASK of 1932 became in 1948 the Werksportverein of the Piberstein mining company, the pit club of Maria Lankowitz in western Styria, home of the Lipizzaner horses of Piber. With sections from handball to chess, it rose to the Styrian Landesliga for the first time in 1956, in the days when the derby against Köflach drew over two thousand people, and it survived the mine's closure in the seventies. Its second life, as patron Hubert Scheer's FC Piberstein Lankowitz, ended in Greek tragedy: autumn champions of the Landesliga in 2015/16, having pushed Admira to the wire in the Austrian Cup, the club stopped mid season after the president's death and declared insolvency. Today it starts again from the bottom, as FC Lankowitz.