The club was formed on 1 August 1919[1] as the football department of the TSV 1850 Lindau under the leadership of Sosthenes Sailer and its first chairman Goldbrunner.

During the years of World War II, football in Lindau actually received a boost with a large number of German soldiers stationed in town.

SpVgg Lindau was formed on 5 March 1950 in the "Gasthof Schweitzerhof", a restaurant and pub and the new club was integrated in the A-Klasse Bodensee that year.

SpVgg finished on top of that league in its first year and gained promotion to the 2nd Amateurliga Oberschwaben where they played for two seasons before being relegated back down.

In 1988, the club managed to rectify this disgrace, winning the league and promoting themselves back to the Bezirksliga, largely on the strength of its goalscorer Thommes who scored 37 goals in 26 games.

Under coach Andreas Wagenhaus, a former East German international, the club came close to promotion with a third-place finish in the Bezirksliga in 2000, but only two years later, relegation was unavoidable again.

The SpVgg Lindau has a somewhat unusual geographical location in German football, based only a few kilometres from the Austrian border, within view of Switzerland and Liechtenstein.