EN
The Mitropa-Cup football games were inaugurated in 1927 and the participants were some states of the former Habsburg monarchy – Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Italy and Yugoslavia. The article is an attempt to identify the most important activities undertaken in Central Europe, inspired mainly by Austria, in order to create a Mitteleuropa-concept using the most popular sports discipline in the region – football. Football, considered to be nonpolitical, helped to develop an area in which diplomatic activities directed towards the realization of political interests and the building of the Central European community were possible. The paper also endeavors to indicate how the Mitropa-Cup served – besides strictly political actions – the purpose of coping with post-Habsburg reality in the sport and social area in the former states of the monarchy.