Tirol entered their first-ever Bundesliga season with hopes of emulating what Hartberg did a year before, which is to defy the odds and stay up despite clearly not being a big enough club to expect an extended stay in the top flight.
The early signs were promising - they beat Austria in their opener and had a W2 D2 L3 record after their opening seven games, which was enough to create a gap between them and the bottom of the table.
However, what followed was a return to reality as Tirol started losing game after game. Apart from a brief period of improvement before the winter and the pandemic breaks, it remained this way until the end of the season.
What proved ultimately their undoing was their post-pandemic form. Despite being in the Relegation Group, surrounded by teams of supposedly similar strength, they managed to win only once in the ten Relegation Group games that they played. They still had a chance of rescuing themselves in the final round - they hosted Admira knowing that beating the Modlingers would result in their survival, but they were held to a 0:0 draw and will return to Erste Liga after only one year in the top flight.
While their relegation hardly comes as too much of a surprise, it will be very interesting to see how they will respond to losing their momentum as a club, having enjoyed a meteoric rise in the seasons preceding this one.
