Thursday, 9 May 2019 marks exactly 55 years to the day since the first Bundesliga title was won – not by record champions Bayern Munich, as you might think, but by what might seem an unlikely club to the modern fan: Cologne.

We kid you not. The newly formed league was founded partly out of concern at the country's football federation that it was falling behind internationally after being knocked out of the 1962 FIFA World Cup in the quarter-finals by Yugoslavia.

Sixteen teams were selected from the various regional leagues across the country, with their on-field success and economic criteria taken into account. Crucially, only one team per city was admitted initially, and as 1860 Munich were the top dogs in Bavaria at the time, Bayern were forced to wait.

Watch: The history behind Cologne's mascot, Hennes the goat

Cologne had no such trouble, though. Hans Schäfer, a 1954 World Cup winner with Germany, was captain of a side that started as they meant to go on in their maiden Bundesliga fixture: a 2-0 victory in front of 30,000 fans away to Saarbrücken on Saturday, 24 August 1963.

If that was an impressive attendance figure for the time, many other aspects of the game were very different. Goalkeepers didn't wear gloves; shirt numbers only went from one to 11 because only eleven players were allowed to play; substitutions were only introduced in 1967 and initially only when the team doctor deemed it necessary; there was no such thing as multi-coloured boots, and the scoreboard was operated manually.

As romantic as that all sounds, Cologne were as hard-nosed as it comes out on the pitch, winning five of their first six matches and plundering 18 goals in the process. The Billy Goats suffered the first of just two defeats on Matchday 7, a 2-1 reverse away to Eintracht Frankfurt, but bounced back to winning ways the following week, the start of an eight-game unbeaten streak that stretched from mid-October to mid-December.

Wolfgang Overath (r.), who would later win the 1974 FIFA World Cup with Germany, scored Cologne's first ever Bundesliga goal on 24 August 1963. - imago sportfotodienst

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By the halfway stage of the campaign, Cologne were top of the standings and four points clear of Schalke – it would have been a six-point lead in modern currency, but at the time only two points were awarded for a win. After a month-long winter break – yes, the Bundesliga had the foresight to give its players a much-needed rest even back then – Georg Knöpfle's side began the second half of the season with a 3-1 defeat at home to Saarbrücken.

Nevertheless, that served as a wake-up call that kick-started a charge for silverware in three competitions over the coming months. Cologne progressed to the UEFA Cup semi-finals, losing 4-3 on aggregate to Spanish side Valencia, the DFB Cup quarter-finals, where they lost 4-2 to Hertha Berlin, but did not lose again in the Bundesliga all term, thanks in large part to 16-goal top scorer Karl-Heinz Thielen.

Almost exactly 55 years to the day since that first Bundesliga triumph, Cologne secured their return to the top flight as Bundesliga 2 champions. - DFL Deutsche Fußball Liga GmbH

And so it came that on 9 May 1964, Cologne won the inaugural Bundesliga season with a record of 17 victories, 11 draws and two defeats, scoring 78 goals and conceding 40, to give them a total of 45 points.

That would equate to 62 in the modern era, a pleasant and timely coincidence given that Cologne have just won the Bundesliga 2 title – you guessed, with 62 points – to return to the top flight next season.

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1. FC Köln

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