Founded in 1895, Fortuna entered the league in 1913 and were regulars in the top flight from the early 1920s until the creation of the Bundesliga in 1963.
The 2023–24 season will be their fourth consecutive season in the 2. Bundesliga since receiving
Fortuna won one German championship in 1933 and two German Cup victories in 1979 and 1980.
Their greatest achievement in European competition was the European Cup Winners' Cup final in 1979, where they lost to Barcelona.
The earliest roots of the association go back to the creation of the gymnastics club Turnverein Flingern on May 5, 1895 in the village of Flingern, today one of the eastern quarters of Düsseldorf.
Two other teams feature in the club's early history: Düsseldorfer Spielverein Football Club, founded in 1908, and FC Alemannia 1911, founded in 1911 and becoming Fortuna 1911 the following year.
In mid-1912, the two clubs merged to form the Düsseldorf football club Fortuna 1911, which played its debut season with the Westdeutschen Spielverband in 1913–1914.
TV Flingern joined Fortuna on November 15, 1919 to create the Düsseldorfer Turn- und Sportverein Fortuna.
In the late 1920s, Fortuna won its first honors as a first-tier team;
The team continued to perform well into the 1930s, winning third and fourth district titles along the way.
Fortuna became the first team to win the title without conceding a single goal in the final rounds of the tournament.
He beat Vorwärts-Rasensport Gleiwitz, Arminia Hannover, Eintracht Frankfurt and finally Schalke 04 on his way to becoming the first national champion from the industrial Rhine-Ruhr region.
The following season the club began playing in the Gauliga Niederrhein, one of the 16 top divisions created by the reorganization of German football under the Third Reich.
Düsseldorf dominated the division throughout the 1930s, being five-time champions between 1936 and 1940, and losing in the final of the national championship in 1936 and the final of the Tchammerpokal, the predecessor of today's DFB-Pokal, in 1937.
The club were relegated in 1942 but quickly returned to the top flight the following season.
In 1944–45 he began playing as a joint wartime team Kriegsspielgemeinschaft TSV Fortuna/SC 99 Düsseldorf with partner Düsseldorfer Sport Club 1899, but only took part in two matches as Nazi Germany fell to the advancing Allied armies.