Originally Posted by
Eric the Half a Bee
Interesting. They played in the top flight until the founding of the new professional league, the Bundesliga, in 1963 and would go on to play as a second division side. My original source for the information made the claim about Mainz, never thought of a reason to question it. It could be argued that they were a relatively large club in Germany until a decade before the friendly. If that graph is correct, they must have been a reason why they weren't a Bundesliga side in 1972/3.