Early history

Founded in 1893, the club is Hesse's oldest. In its first year, the club was winless in a half dozen matches, but the next season emerged as south German champion and earned an appearance in a national championship match. Hanau was one of the founding clubs of the German Football Association formed in 1900.

In those early days of German football Hanau laid a 23–1 drubbing on a hopelessly green Kickers Offenbach side. The club managed a series of unsuccessful appearances in the local league final between 1902 and 1905 and were "robbed" of a title through bureaucratic machinations in 1907, before finally taking the local title in 1909. It became a founding member of the Nordkreis-Liga in 1909, where it played until the outbreak of the war. After the First World War, the club played in the Kreisliga Nordmain without any real success. In 1926, Hanau found itself in a legal squabble with FSV Frankfurt and the league that led to its exclusion from play for a short time. Through the late 1920s and into the 1930s the team played in the Bezirksliga Main-Hessen of the Süddeutschland Verband.

Nazi era

German football was reorganized into sixteen top-flight divisions, or Gauligen, in Nazi Germany in 1933. Playing in the Gauliga Hessen Hanau captured three more regional titles in the late 1930s (1935, 1936, 1938) and advanced to the quarter-finals of the inaugural Tschammerpokal, predecessor of today's DFB-Pokal, in 1935. The Gauliga Hessen was broken up into two divisions in 1941 with the club going to the Gauliga Hessen-Nassau where they played consistently good football until the collapse of football leagues in Germany at the end of World War II. In spite of their play they were not granted entry to the local upper-tier leagues once re-established after the war, being bypassed for clubs from larger towns, and losing their ground to the American military.

Post war football

However, the club pressed on, playing in improvised uniforms on temporary grounds. Through the next two decades they bounced up and down between what was then second and third division play in Hesse. Their play improved enough to earn the side regular appearances in the Oberliga Hessen (III) through the late 1960s and into the 1970s, and in 1978–79 they enjoyed the adventure of a break through into the 2nd Bundesliga Süd. After a 17th-place finish, they returned to the Oberliga Hessen (III) where they played until 1987. The club had a brush with financial failure in the mid 1990s that included the loss of their grounds, and considered a merger with Progres Frankfurt. They were able to recover themselves and, for a while, Hanau played in Gruppenliga Frankfurt Ost (VII) with a renewed focus on its youth teams. For the first time since the introduction of a single Hessenliga in the 1947/48 season, there will be the first Hanau derby in the coming 2023/24 season. The city rival is the Verbandsliga Süd champions and climbers of the 2022/23 season, Hanauer SC 1960. The so-called HSC was founded in 1960 in a pub on Freigerichtstraße in the workers' housing estate, colloquially known as the "Dunlopviertel". and previously played in the Verbandsliga for seven years, in which the club rose from the group league for the first time in 2016. This first Hessenliga derby will take place on Easter Saturday 2024 as the HSC's home game in the Herbert Dröse Stadium.