SAMSTAG 15:30

Founded: Jan 1, 1926
Club Members: 657
Nickname: SVWW
Coach: Markus Kauczinski
Captain: Sascha Mockenhaupt

Oberliga Hessen: 1
Landespokal Hessen Winner: 7

Website: www.svww.de

The club's origins can be traced back to 1st January 1926 when a group of footballers led by Heinz Dilger gathered in the village of Taunusstein, a few miles north of Wiesbaden, to discuss forming their own club - SV Wehen 1926. The suffix 'Taunusstein' was soon added to make life easier for visiting teams and, after moving into the Stadion am Halberg in 1927, the nascent club spent their formative years in the local A-Klasse Wiesbaden championship. The make-up of the club at the time was typical of others - full of players and supporters from the socialist and communist milieu - but within weeks of their rise to power in 1933, the Nazis deemed several figures within the association to be "politically unreliable" and ordered SV to disband and form part of a more ideologically palatable club called TV 1874 Wehen.

A combination of Allied bombing and Red Army artillery around Berlin brought Hitler's 'Thousand Year Reich' to an end in 1945 and the introduction of a de-Nazification policy across occupied Germany saw all sports clubs forced to disband. As the country struggled to catch its breath after the conflict, a fan named Karl Bender, determined to see his team play competitive football again, reformed the club as SV Wehen on 20th March 1946 and they returned to action playing in local championships. After becoming B-Klasse Wiesbaden champions in 1957,  the district league and cup double was won in 1960 before promotion to the A-Klasse Wiesbaden was clinched five years later on the back of a tour-de-force campaign that saw them score a record 117 goals and concede a miserly 15. With momentum building, they progressed to the fifth-tier Berzirklsliga in 1968 before performances eventually began to tail off and a despondent 1970-71 season saw them finish rock bottom of the table and return to the A-Klasse Wiesbaden.

The rest of the 1970s were spent as a mid-to-lower table side and it wasn't until water filter entrepreneur and life-long SVW fan Heinz Hankammer succeeded Helmut Kraft as club chairman in 1979 that fortunes started to turn around. Having formed the BRITA filter company in 1966, Hankammer used his considerable financial clout to sanction the signing of established players like ex-Kaiserslautern striker Bruno Hübner (who also doubled up as a sales manager for a time at BRITA) in an attempt to bring professional football to the Hessen club. Promotion back to the Bezirksliga was secured in 1983 and, as the heavy investment continued, the Landesliga Hessen title followed in 1989. A league restructure in 1994 then meant a seventh-place finish in the Oberliga Hessen was enough to secure a place in the new third-tier Regionalliga Sud and it wasn't long before the Hankammer era was being defined by consistently strong league campaigns and lucrative DFB-Pokal matches against the likes of 1.FC Kaiserslautern, Eintracht Frankfurt and Borussia Dortmund. They also found time to lift the Hessen-Pokal in 1988, 1996 and 2000. Even the heartbreak of narrowly missing out on promotion in 2005 and 2006 failed to knock them off course and a year later, this small village club finally made it big when they outpaced rising force TSG 1899 Hoffenheim to the 2006-07 Regionalliga Sud title and became a Bundesliga.2 club for the first time. 

Despite the club's meteoric rise up the pyramid however, home matches were rarely played in front of more than a 1000 or so onlookers, and with the Stadion am Halberg's ramshackle and outdated facilities failing to meet the criteria needed for Bundesliga.2 stadiums, Hankammer saw the opportunity for a reboot. The "Abramovich from the Village" spent €14 million that summer building the BRITA-Arena in nearby Wiesbaden before restructuring the club by creating a new professional football department. He then addressed the impending move to the Hessian state capital by launching a rebrand that not only included a new logo, but also a new name - 'SV Wehen Wiesbaden'.
 

With traditional rivals SV Wiesbaden caught in a tailspin that had seen them relegated to the seventh-tier Landesliga Hessen Mitte amidst a financial crisis that threatened their very existence, the battle for local hearts and minds was soon won and, with average attendances now pushing 9,000, SVWW finished their debut Bundesliga.2 campaign in a very creditable 8th place. They even helped write the history books that year when striker Ronny Köning set a Bundesliga.2 record by netting a seven minute hat-trick against 1.FC Koln before teammate Benjamin Siegert followed up in the next match with the fastest goal in German professional football when he took just 8 seconds to open the scoring against SpVgg Greuther Fürth ! Despite the promising start however, fortunes began to drift and the club limped to relegation in 2009 despite being buoyed by a run to the DFB-Pokal quarter-finals for the first time that year.

Having succeeded his father as club president in November 2010, Markus Hankammer arrived at the helm keen for the club to become more sustainable and avoid getting caught in a self-perpetuating cycle of reliance on the Hankammer family and BRITA for funding (the club are one of the few in German football today that actually turn a profit each year). No longer able to call on their local bankroller and with big-money additions now out of the question, SVWW became an almost permanent fixture in the third-tier over the next decade as no fewer than 11 managers - among them Sandro Schwarz, Peter Vollmann and Christian Hock (three times !) - tried to win promotion on a budget. Rüdiger Rehm finally managed it in 2019 when he led SVWW back to Bundesliga.2 after negotiating a play-off against FC Ingolstadt but the stay was, once again, a brief one and a league double over VfB Stuttgart was the only highlight in a disappointing campaign that saw them join Dynamo Dresden in the drop zone. SVWW regrouped under new coach Markus Kauczinski however and ended a three year exile from Bundesliga.2 in 2023 when DSC Arminia Bielefeld were comprehensively dismantled 6-1 on aggregate in a promotion/relegation play-off.