“Enough about towns succeeding. What about cities failing?” growled Andy Wainwright last week. “I saw recently that currently Sheffield is the largest place in Europe without a top division side – is this true? If not what is? Of course Sheffield has trophies in the bag, so second question: what is the largest conurbation that has not won their nation’s top league or cup? Suspect this needs to be limited to countries where football is the so-called national sport (otherwise the answer might be a long list of Chinese/US cities). In the UK I would guess Bristol …”
As with our look at successful towns over the past couple of weeks population figures are a rather tricky beast but several of you emailed to point out Sheffield is not even the largest place in England without a top-flight team – depending on your definition, either Leeds or Bristol or both (or neither: there’s an interesting piece on the problems with defining city populations here) have higher populations than the jewel of South Yorkshire and neither can boast a Premier League side. Indeed 1979-80 was the last season in which top-flight football was played in Bristol.
Neither City nor Rovers have managed to take the league or FA Cup titles to Bristol, so as far as the UK is concerned Bristol does indeed answer the second half of Andy’s question. However: “Teesside has a greater population (seventh on this list) and Middlesbrough have not won the top league or cup either, winning only the League Cup in 2004,” writes Martin Burke.
The home of the misfiring big-city team, though, is Germany. “There are a few German cities that don’t live up to their potential,” writes Sonja Meyer. “Düsseldorf has a population of around 600,000 and the city’s most important football club Fortuna Düsseldorf is struggling in the 2. Bundesliga. Essen and Dresden both have populations of over 500,000 and they have teams in the third (Dynamo Dresden) and fourth (Rot-Weiss Essen) tiers.”
But when it comes to real underachievement look no further than … Novosibirsk in Siberia. Russia’s third most populous city is home to almost 1,500,000 people and FC Sibir Novosibirsk. In their 79-year history Sibir have been in the top-flight only once – in 2010, when they finished rock bottom, 10 points adrift of safety. They did reach the final of the 2009 Russian Cup, where they were narrowly beaten by Zenit St Petersburg but other than that the trophy cabinet at the Spartak Stadium remains empty.
NON-LEAGUERS TO PREMIER LEAGUERS
“Has there ever been an instance where two players have lined up against one another in non-league football only to do so again in the top division?” wonders Tom Ayres. “Even better – any internationals where former non-leaguers have gone toe to toe again? I was hoping Jamie Vardy and Chris Smalling may have crossed swords when playing for Stocksbridge Park Steels and Maidstone United respectively but this doesn’t look likely.”
“After reading Tom Ayres’ question, I had an extensive trawl through the Wikipedia page of the serial air miles collector Barry Hayles and discovered that in 1997 he represented England’s Non League Team as Lee Hughes’ strike partner,” writes Joe Bradbury. “Hayles was at Stevenage at the time and Hughes at Kidderminster, and one would only assume they faced off against each other at least once between 1994 and 1997, when both sides were Conference clubs. Fast forward to the heady days of the 2002-03 season and both men are now plying their trade in the Premier League. On 31 August 2002 Fulham travel to the Hawthorns, Lee Hughes starts for the Baggies, looking for the chance to show Hayles how far he’s come from non neague, but Fulham manager Jean Tigana has other ideas, leaving Hayles on the bench as an unused sub. In the return fixture Hayles didn’t make the squad and all hope of these two playing against each other in the Premier League was over.
“It is worth noting however that the two plied their trade in the same division countless other times and lined up together in the following games: 2000-01 Division One/Championship, West Brom v Fulham 7 April 2001; 2008-09 League One Oldham v Cheltenham 23 August 2008; 2009-10 League Two, Cheltenham vs Notts County 3 October 2009. So it is entirely feasible that Lee Hughes and Barry Hayles have faced each other in 4 of the top 5 divisions of English football.”
And here’s Peter Smyth with something to look forward to: “On 17 August 2008, Rushden & Diamonds drew 1-1 with Wrexham in the Conference Premier. Lee Tomlin started for Rushden, while Neil Taylor came on as a sub for Wrexham.
On 21 November Swansea play Bournemouth in the Premier League and they will meet again (assuming they both play).”
LONGEST TRIP FOR AN ABANDONMENT (3)
A few weeks ago we looked at the clubs and fans who have made the longest trips only for their games to be abandoned. David Mead has since written with this tale of an even longer journey:
“I worked in Japan as an English teacher around the time of the World Cup (2002),” writes David (London) and Miyuki (Tokyo). “One of my students, at the start of her first lesson, declared that she was not interested in text books and just wanted to talk all things football. Fine by me. She was an ardent Urawa Reds supporter and her dream was to watch them play Manchester United one day.
“In August 2004, United hosted a pre-season tournament with Boca Juniors, PSC and Urawa Reds. My student duly booked her ticket from Tokyo to Manchester to see her dreams come true. It was August in Manchester - what could possibly go wrong? An electric thunder-storm could go wrong. Match abandoned. Around 800 Urawa fans were at Old Trafford that day. The distance from Saitama Stadium to Old Trafford is just under six thousand miles. A round trip of 11,728 miles. Ouch.”
LEICESTER: STAYING UP
“The pessimistic Leicester fan in the office is not being carried away by their recent form and asked which team in the Premier League has been the one relegated from the highest position at Christmas?” writes Ashley Braithwaite.
Two pieces of good news here: Leicester are safe, and Pete Waterhouse has done the hard yards in order to explain why:
“The pessimistic fan can (probably) rest easy as since the Premier League downsized to 20 teams in 1995-96, no team has gone down having accrued 23 points or more by Christmas,” he writes. “Leicester (as I write) have 25. It’s also worth pointing out that 73% of all teams relegated were in the bottom four whilst tucking into their turkey.
“Just looking at the 20 team era, the best early season performers to end up going down were Blackpool. Their early season burst saw them on 22 points from 16 games, a feat made more remarkable by the cancellation of three home games, and the fact that they won the next game 2-0 away to Sunderland to go to 25 from 17, only six of which were at home. On Christmas day itself Blackpool were 11th with one or two games in hand on everyone around them - this was the highest Christmas position of any team who were subsequently relegated.
“However, the question wanted to cover the whole Premier :eague, and back when there were 42 games a season there were two others worthy of mention. The first was in the very first Premier League season, when Middlesbrough, in 12th at Christmas with 26 points from 20 games, ended up going down with 44 from 42 (this was the season Palace dropped despite achieving 49pts in their 42 games).
“I’ve saved the best for last, however. The undoubted kings of the second half of the season collapse are Norwich City. Whilst the players were at home opening their presents in 1994, they were sitting pretty in seventh, with 30 points on the board from 19 games. Even in a season where the bottom four dropped, they must have believed they were safe.
“Starting with a New Year’s Day tonking at Liverpool they went 11 games without a win. Then facing a tense derby against relegation haunted local rivals Ipswich they won 3-0 to leave them 11th, on 42 points (eight points clear of the drop) with eight games to go (incidently, Arsenal and Chelsea were still below them at this point).
“Unfortunately, they conspired to lose the next seven games and were relegated with a game to spare, They drew the final game against Villa and finished third from bottom too, so they couldn’t even blame the fact that four went down that year too.”
KNOWLEDGE ARCHIVE
“Wayne Bridge’s decision to withdraw from England’s World Cup squad set me thinking about other players who were team-mates despite being sworn enemies,” wrote Lex Sim in 2010. “One well-known example is the Tommy Smith-Emlyn Hughes feud of the 1970s, although the circumstances were different, and Smith and Hughes played together for years in a very successful side. Are there others?”
Infighting? Team-mates at war? Sworn enemies in the same side? Holland seems to be the obvious place to start. Trouble in the Dutch camp goes way back, with tension between Ajax players and non-Ajax players alleged even at the 1974 World Cup.
Perhaps the starkest example of Holland team-mates failing to get along came at Euro 96. The problems at the tournament had been a long time brewing and the catalyst was the situation at Ajax where young black players – Edgar Davids, Michael Reiziger and Patrick Kluivert among them – were being paid around 20% that of Ronald de Boer, Danny Blind and co. Clarence Seedorf, firm friends with Davids and Kluivert, had jumped ship to Sampdoria two years earlier after De Boer was handed the right-midfield role at Ajax when it had allegedly been promised to Seedorf. The latter blamed Blind, De Boer and the coach, Louis van Gaal.
With that background it was little surprise that trouble flared at the tournament. Blind, the captain, was suspended from the opening game against Scotland but publicly criticised Seedorf and Davids after the disappointing draw. Seedorf hit back at the “lack of respect”. Then Davids was dropped for the game against Switzerland. He reacted by telling Dutch newspapers that the coach, Guus Hiddink, “should not put his head in the ass of some players” – a reference to Davids’s Ajax team-mates De Boer and Blind – and was summarily kicked out of the squad. But despite the exit of his friend and the ongoing animosity in the squad, Seedorf still managed an hour on the same pitch as Blind and De Boer in the quarter-final defeat to France.
Though the tension between Lothar Matthäus and Stefan Effenberg never manifested itself on the pitch either with Bayern Munich or the national side, the German midfielders never really saw eye-to-eye. Effenberg reserved special opprobrium for Matthäus in his 2003 autobiography, I Showed Them All, calling the former Germany captain “a big mouth” and a “quitter”, and including a chapter entitled “What Lothar Matthäus knows about football” which consisted simply of a blank page (Perhaps an hommage to The Clown Prince of Soccer, the 1955 autobiography of the Sunderland and England striker Len Shackleton which contained a chapter headed “The Average Director’s Knowledge of Football” followed by a similarly blank page).
The West Brom cult hero Bob Taylor was thought to be inadvertently behind the breakdown of Andy Cole and Teddy Sheringham’s relationship at Manchester United. The on-loan striker opened the scoring for Bolton Wanderers at Old Trafford back in February 1998, a goal that led to a dressing-room squabble between Cole and Sheringham as to who was responsible.
However Cole has since revealed that the ill-feeling, on his part at least, stretched back to his England debut. “I walked on to the pitch, 60,000 or so watching,” he said. “Sheringham is coming off. I expect a brief handshake, a ‘Good luck, Coley’, something. I am ready to shake. He snubs me. He actively snubs me, for no reason I was ever aware of then or since. He walks off.
“I was embarrassed. I was confused. And there you have it. From that moment on, I knew Sheringham was not for me.”
When the colossal egos of Edmundo and Romário met at Vasco de Gama in 1999 fireworks were always likely – though they had previously been friends the latter had depicted the former on the men’s toilet door at his Café do Gol bar a year earlier much to Edmundo’s chagrin.
Troubled brewed in 2000 when prior to a game Romário was handed the captaincy. The deposed captain – guess who – went home in a serious huff, and the pair sniped at each other thereafter, with one incident, Romário taking a penalty and missing when Edmundo had expected to take it, causing the affair to flare up. Edmundo called his striker partner the “Prince” to the club president’s “King”. Romário, with fairly sharp wit, tagged his team-mate as “the court jester”. The turbulent relationship ended when Edmundo left for Santos in 2000.
Juan Pablo Sorín and Juan Sebastián Verón came to blows in the tunnel at half-time of a Champions League match between Villarreal and Internazionale in 2006, a match notable because no fewer than 15 of the players on the pitch, plus one of the managers on the touchline, were South American. Though the two were on opposing sides that night, they were both Argentinian internationals and thereafter refused to play together for the national side.
And Olof Mellberg and Freddy Ljungberg were another rum pair, evil-glaring their way through any number of internationals for Sweden, and famously filmed scrapping in a training session. Four years later, in 2006, the pair allegedly fought in the dressing room after a 0-0 World Cup draw with Trinidad & Tobago, with a spokesman confirming that a “short, hot dispute” had taken place.
For thousands more sepia-tinged questions and answers take a trip through the Knowledge archive or pick up a copy of More Knowledge from the Guardian Bookshop.
Can you help?
“As a follow up to Martin Fleet’s question about players having statues outside two venues: John Arne Riise only played 25 games for his hometown club Aalesund, before leaving for Monaco as an 18-year old,” writes Guffen Helleve. “In 2005 Aalesund opened a new stadium, and outside the ground a statue of Riise was unveiled. Has any player with fewer games for a club been honoured with a statue outside their ground?”
“In our weekly radio show ‘Fotbollsarena’ on Swedish public broadcasting the listeners have failed to find another example of what just happened in the Swedish second tier,” writes Richard Henriksson. “This season, both Mjallby and Brommapojkarna were relegated, only a year after going down from the first division. There are numerous examples of one team dropping down a divison two years in a row. But has there ever been enother axample of this – multiple teams doing just that in the same season?”
“On 23 Nov 1991, Aberdeen and Scotland defender Brian Irvine conceded a penalty, then ended up saving the resultant penalty as goalkeeper,” writes Andrew Wilson. “Is this a unique event in football history, I wonder?”
“Following Owain Fon Williams debut for Wales, six years after first making the squad, how has been in the most international squads without ever getting on to the pitch?” wonders Garfield Ward.
“Other than the Peter Taylor Stand at the City Ground, are there any other stands or stadia in world football named after assistant managers (or other backroom staff)?” asks Matt K.
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