Kreisliga Odenwald
highest association football league in the northern part of the German state of Baden
The Kreisliga Odenwald (English: District league Odenwald) was the highest association football league in the northern part of the German state of Baden and the southern part of the state of Hesse from 1919 to 1923. The league was disbanded with the introduction of the Bezirksliga Rhein in 1923.
The league was named after the Odenwald, a forest in the border region of Hesse and Baden.
Overview
Predecessor
From 1907, four regional leagues were formed within the structure of the Southern German football championship, in a move to improve the organisation of football in Southern Germany, these being:
Ostkreis-Liga, covering Bavaria
Nordkreis-Liga, covering Hesse
Südkreis-Liga, covering Württemberg, Baden and Alsace
Westkreis-Liga, covering the Palatinate, Lorraine and the southern Rhine Province
In 1908, a first Westkreis-Liga (English: Western District League) was established. With the outbreak of the First World War, league football came to a halt and, during the war, games were only played on a limited level.
Post-First World War
With the collapse of the German Empire in 1918, no Westkreis championship was played in 1918-19 but football returned to a more organised system in 1919.
Southern Germany, now without the Alsace and Lorraine regions, the later having been part of the Westkreis and had to be returned to France, was sub-divided into ten Kreisligas, these being:
Kreisliga Hessen
Kreisliga Nordbayern
Kreisliga Nordmain
Kreisliga Odenwald
Kreisliga Pfalz
Kreisliga Saar
Kreisliga Südbayern
Kreisliga Südmain
Kreisliga Südwest
Kreisliga Württemberg
The new Kreisliga Odenwald was made up from ten clubs from the Westkreis region. The league winners of the Kreisligas advanced to the Southern championship. This system applied for the 1919-20 and 1920-21 season.
In 1921-22, the Kreisliga Odenwald was split into two groups of eight, increasing the number of tier-one clubs in the region to 16.
“Kreisliga Odenwald” enters the record as highest association football league in the northern part of the German state of Baden. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Kreisliga, Odenwald and highest can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6436639. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1919, 1923, 1907 and 1908.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kreisliga Odenwald” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.