Football (Soccer) Thread

[Gups]

Went to real Madrid today. Amazing stadium. Shit atmosphere. Maybe 2,000 singing out of 80 odd thousand. Really no comparison to even an average championship game in England.

[Josquius]

My god villa are awful.
Terrible refereeing decision left Sunderland with 10 men most of the game.... And we still should have won rather than drawn.
Whats gone wrong with them?

[Norgy]

One thing strikes me. Most footballing countries have several good clubs in the capital (well, except Berlin). Norway used to have several that were contenders.

Oslo has two clubs in the top tier now, but that is more an exception to the rule. Vålerenga is the working-class club with the largest following. Lyn used to be their main rival, but went bankrupt. They have managed to get into second tier football again.

In Denmark FC København or Brøndby have been dominant for decades. In Sweden, Hammarby, Djurgården and AIK have derbies worth seeing. Although, perhaps, IFK Göteborg and Malmö have been the more successful clubs in Europe.

My hometown team is down in the fourth tier. Which I suppose is a sign of the general population decline and aging population in the area.

I am still puzzled by how poorly Oslo's clubs are doing. There is no Arsenal or Tottenham there. Vålerenga won a league title in 2005. I used to go and see them regularly, and their supporters are the birth mother of ultras culture in Norway.

Sports journalists are more concerned with the fall of Rosenborg from Trondheim. It has been spectacular. From constant UCL and breaking Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund back in the 90s, it is all mid-table and and some truly odd defeats. It is a big club, still, by Norwegian standards. But I think both time and money is running out. Their last manager who won the championship, they sacked. After winning the league. Like The Beatles sang in "Penny Lane". Very strange.

I think the main problem with Norwegian football now is that the league season is too long and there are too many clubs in the first and second tier. Norway does not have have the talent for 30 top and second tier clubs. But there are always willing journeymen from other leagues.

[Syt]

One thing strikes me. Most footballing countries have several good clubs in the capital (well, except Berlin). Norway used to have several that were contenders.

As Babylon 5 fan it always tickles me that the two big Vienna clubs, arch rivals Rapid and Austria, have the club colors green and purple.


(From reddit)

[Norgy]

They dominated the first European competition, the Mitropa cup. Austria Wien had the amazing player Mathias Sindelar.
Czech clubs like Slavia Praha were among the best in Europe too. The Mitropa was actually a heirloom from Austria-Hungary. Hungarian clubs like MTK (Muskel-Judentum) and Ferencvaros were pretty intimidating as well.

Football history is social history, really. One of my nerdy fascinations.

[celedhring]

One of my favorite bits of antiquity history are the Nika riots. Always found the mix of sports factionalism, politics and social tensions utterly fascinating. And it nearly brought down an empire.

[Josquius]

As Babylon 5 fan it always tickles me that the two big Vienna clubs, arch rivals Rapid and Austria, have the club colors green and purple.


(From reddit)

I would love to see a good write up about this.
As honestly I suspect its largely a surprisingly modern thing.
With Sunderland and Newcastle Utd for instance.... my family are from County Durham so we're Sunderland fans mainly. But my hometown is closer to Newcastle. My great grandad would have no trouble going to see Sunderland one week and United the next, cheering for the Geordie team whoever they were.
Even my dad, getting towards the 70s-80s would go to see Newcastle sometimes and not be specifically hoping for them to lose.
My family then ended up quite weird with my great grandad settling as a Sunderland fan along with my dad and his youngest half-brother, but my grandad,  my dad, his brother, and his other half-brother are all Sunderland.
I should really ask my uncle for an explanation of this someday- my grandad used to manage a pub often visited by Sunderland players so its bizarre.

Anyway. Away from my family. It was John Hall who is usually pointed to as the source of the bitterness. He was owner of Newcastle Utd in the 90s and had this vision of building them up as a sports empire, hijacked and warped the term Geordie to refer to Newcastle Utd, and so on.
But I suspect it probably went back a little further to him into the 80s and the age of hooliganism et al.

One thing strikes me. Most footballing countries have several good clubs in the capital (well, except Berlin). Norway used to have several that were contenders.

Oslo has two clubs in the top tier now, but that is more an exception to the rule. Vålerenga is the working-class club with the largest following. Lyn used to be their main rival, but went bankrupt. They have managed to get into second tier football again.

In Denmark FC København or Brøndby have been dominant for decades. In Sweden, Hammarby, Djurgården and AIK have derbies worth seeing. Although, perhaps, IFK Göteborg and Malmö have been the more successful clubs in Europe.

My hometown team is down in the fourth tier. Which I suppose is a sign of the general population decline and aging population in the area.

I am still puzzled by how poorly Oslo's clubs are doing. There is no Arsenal or Tottenham there. Vålerenga won a league title in 2005. I used to go and see them regularly, and their supporters are the birth mother of ultras culture in Norway.

Sports journalists are more concerned with the fall of Rosenborg from Trondheim. It has been spectacular. From constant UCL and breaking Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund back in the 90s, it is all mid-table and and some truly odd defeats. It is a big club, still, by Norwegian standards. But I think both time and money is running out. Their last manager who won the championship, they sacked. After winning the league. Like The Beatles sang in "Penny Lane". Very strange.

I think the main problem with Norwegian football now is that the league season is too long and there are too many clubs in the first and second tier. Norway does not have have the talent for 30 top and second tier clubs. But there are always willing journeymen from other leagues.

I wonder if they're looking into the sort of reform Switzerland have made?

https://breakingthelines.com/news/domestic-league-formatting-around-europe-is-swiss-footballs-reform-a-good-thing/

Then theres the Scottish system of 3 games followed by a split. Which just hits me as very broken.

Every so often you see calls for a North Sea League (often with Portugal weirdly tacked on). Been a while since I've seen that.... I wonder why a Scandi league hasn't happened at least.


Also on capital clubs. Not really commented on in English outside of specialist football media but the current rise of Paris FC is intriguing. It has always struck me as weird Paris just had PSG vs. London with a bazillion teams. And even there PSG aren't exactly that rich in history.

[Syt]

They dominated the first European competition, the Mitropa cup. Austria Wien had the amazing player Mathias Sindelar.
Czech clubs like Slavia Praha were among the best in Europe too. The Mitropa was actually a heirloom from Austria-Hungary. Hungarian clubs like MTK (Muskel-Judentum) and Ferencvaros were pretty intimidating as well.

Football history is social history, really. One of my nerdy fascinations.

Rapid Vienna also were German Champions in 1941. (They won the final against Schalke on 22th June '41, the day Operation Barbarossa started.)

In the past, Rapid was more of a "working class" club, while Austria was seen as the "bourgeois" club. This is no longer the case, but ultras for both clubs do clash time and again and every few years you may see disgruntled fans of one side or other storming the field (like last year). Anecdotally, football fans are viewed as uneducated violent drunk proles among many of my friends and colleagues, not least thanks to this kind of "culture" which also leaves me fairly uninterested in both clubs.

[Syt]

On capital clubs, I think there's two factors - Germany as a whole is fairly decentralized. Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt  Cologne etc. are all important centers of their own.

For another, football prospered in working class milieus, so plenty of traditional clubs rose in the Ruhr area, most notably the likes of Schalke or Dortmund.

[Duque de Bragança]

Every so often you see calls for a North Sea League (often with Portugal weirdly tacked on). Been a while since I've seen that.... I wonder why a Scandi league hasn't happened at least.

I have seen it under the name of Atlantic league with Dutch clubs as well.

Also on capital clubs. Not really commented on in English outside of specialist football media but the current rise of Paris FC is intriguing. It has always struck me as weird Paris just had PSG vs. London with a bazillion times. And even there PSG aren't exactly that rich in history.

There was another Parisian club in the first division till the early '90s in fact. The new one is from a split from PSG, a little known part of their early history. Plus some in the suburbs earlier on I think, such as Red Star in Saint-Ouen, workers' club originally.

[celedhring]

On capital clubs, I think there's two factors - Germany as a whole is fairly decentralized. Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt  Cologne etc. are all important centers of their own.

For another, football prospered in working class milieus, so plenty of traditional clubs rose in the Ruhr area, most notably the likes of Schalke or Dortmund.

Neither Barça or Espanyol were working class clubs though. Barça was the club for the expat community (Swiss and Englishmen) who brought the game to the city, while Espanyol was the club of the posh Catalan burgeoise. The more working class neighborhood clubs in Barcelona were always very small.

Both Barça and Espanyol's home turfs were in the city's wealthier part, particularly Espanyol's. Their traditional home turf - Sarrià - remains the wealthiest place in Barcelona.

I don't know that much about the Madrid clubs to know their original social background - besides Atlético being a feeder club for Athletic Bilbao.

[Josquius]

On capital clubs, I think there's two factors - Germany as a whole is fairly decentralized. Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt  Cologne etc. are all important centers of their own.

For another, football prospered in working class milieus, so plenty of traditional clubs rose in the Ruhr area, most notably the likes of Schalke or Dortmund.

Neither Barça or Espanyol were working class clubs though. Barça was the club for the expat community (Swiss and Englishmen) who brought the game to the city, while Espanyol was the club of the posh Catalan burgeoise. The more working class neighborhood clubs in Barcelona were always very small.

Honestly didn't know that.
Weird Barca is the mega-club whilst Espanyol the plucky underdogs.

[Norgy]

According to historians, Real Madrid used to be, before the civil war, a working class club. Then Franco made it Spanish football's flagship. Got Puskas and de Stefano in, and the rest is history.

There was a Nordic club competition, called The Royal League. Yes, they used that name. But it was played in winter, and with Nordic climate being what it is, it wasn't a great success.

I was actually at a Hertha Berlin game. I don't remember who they played, but they were Bundesliga B. The stadium was half-empty.

When I say a club is working-class in Norway, it has to do with a split that happened during the early 1930s.

The labour organisations started their own league, and their own federation of clubs. In my town, it resulted in three clubs in a town with less than 15.000 living here at the time. They all played at the same ground in the middle of the city.

My dad was a socialist through and through, but he supported the bourgeoisie club. So when I started playing myself, that was the natural choice. Eventually, all clubs merged, but we have not exactly been blessed with much improvement in results. I actually sat on the board for two years in this new club. Not because I know football well, but because they needed someone who could write.

There was not much animosity between the clubs, rather more an exchange of players and no-one was ever called a traitor.

My debut as a 10-year old did not go well, though. We lost 0-17.

[Sheilbh]

Isn't it also a legacy of Vichy? I remember reading somewhere that Vichy dismantled sports governance and established "nation" leagues that explicitly only allowed one team per region (presumably to avoid disorder/local derbies). So lots of teams merged into single teams during the war.

[Duque de Bragança]

Vichy's legacy in sports is seen in rugby. Football being already (too) professional was not exactly the most favoured sport since Vichy wanted amateur sports.

In rugby, Vichy did a lot yes, since they viewed rugby league as leftist (?!) and professional so rugby union became the preferred rugby variant. Even tried to ban rugby league for and using the word rugby for rugby league (jeu à XIII instead of rugby à XIII) which was still heard much later after the Vichy régime.