Riga Vanderer

Riga Vanderer (sometimes written as Wanderer, in later years – Rīgas Vilki, also – RV) was a

football

club that was founded in 1927, disbanded in 1940, restored a year later and disbanded again in 1944.

History

Founding

The decision of founding the new sports club was made by

RFK

, there started a deep rivalry between these two clubs and several of their matches ended in violence.

The first match

Riga Vanderer played its first ever game against

Valdis Plade, Aleksejs Andrejevs and Veinbergs. The Tallinn

club won with 3–0.

Road to the higher league

As a new club despite it having several national team footballers in the squad Vanderers had to start from the very bottom – that is the level B

Rīgas FK footballers – Alfons Novickis and Vladimirs Svistuņenko in the squad) won the A class tournament^[3] and because the Latvian Higher League

was extended, it earned a place there without additional play-off matches.

The higher league years

There was no question whether Vanderer was ready to play in the higher league, as it had enough experienced footballers in the squad, however its top-flight début was even more impressive than most expected – Vanderer finished third in the league, mostly thanks to the tight defensive triangle – Jurgens, Sīmanis and Rūdolfs Kundrāts (the latter had joined Vanderer from LSB Riga).

The 1931 season was less successful but in 1932 Vanderers got the closest to winning the gold of the Latvian league in its history. Despite having lost

RFK) that year Vanderers finished with the same number of points as ASK. Therefore, a golden match was necessary, and in it ASK proved to be the stronger side by winning 3–1.^[4]

Vanderer could not better its 1932 result over the years, yet it repeated the second-place finish in 1934, but the margin between Vanderer and the title winners

Latvian Cup

was already a very prestigious tournament in which participated all the best Latvian football clubs. In the autumn of 1938 the club changed its name from the foreign-sounding Vanderer to the Latvian Rīgas Vilki ("Riga Wolves"), in short – RV.

The main problem for RV for several years in the 1930s was lack of a reliable first choice goalkeeper after Jurgens had left it. Degners, Zakss, Strautmanis, Katlaps, Jūlijs Lindenbergs (a former national team goalkeeper) were tried but none of them proved to be good enough. That changed in 1936 when Jānis Bebris from Union Riga joined the club, thus filling the weakest position in the Vanderer squad. The best goalscorers for RV in the second half of the 1930s were Hugo Vītols and Alfrēds Verners, Hermanis Jēnihs and Alberts Šeibelis (the latter spent a couple years with V. Ķuze before it was disbanded). The most long-lasting member of Vanderer was Ādolfs Sīmanis who played for the club from its very first days until 1940.

Dissolution

In 1940 after Latvia was occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union there were major changes in the sports club structure in Latvia and most of the former clubs were disbanded, and RV was one of those. Its footballers joined different newly founded clubs of the Soviet system: RDKA Riga (Jānis Bebris), FK Dinamo Riga (Ādolfs Sīmanis), Spartaks Rīga (Alberts Šeibelis), RGK Riga (Šeino). Meanwhile, several other former RV footballers had repatriated to Germany in 1939, including former national team players Ēriks Brēde and Ēriks Bēze.