THE LIST: The greatest rivalries in club football, Nos 10-1By Matt Fortune
Last updated at 12:01 AM on 18th September 2009
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WHAT IS THE GREATEST RIVALRY IN CLUB FOOTBALL?
This week's LIST on Sportsmail Online runs down the top 50 rivalries in club football across the globe. The usual suspects should dominate the top 10, surely, but do you agree with the selections of our team? TELL US WHAT YOU THINK From Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and London. Rome to Rio and Buenos Aires.
Most cities have football clubs where derby day is the main event in the calendar for fans, publicans, pundits and police.
But some of the greatest football rivalries make no sense geographically.
Supporters of teams across the world look forward to traveling miles and miles just to earn the bragging rights for another season.
So, whatever the background to the biggest grudge matches, Sportsmail's team of experts have put their heads together to come up with the 50 greatest clashes that really get the blood boiling.
Join us for our countdown to No 1.
Read Nos 50-41Read Nos 40-31Read Nos 30-21 Read Nos 20-11
10 Palmeiras v Corinthians
The story of Brazil’s greatest football rivalry begins with a group of Europeans who would later become known as the ‘betrayers’. The rebel members split from Corinthians to create a sports club for Italians, known as Palestra Italia, and later just simply Palestra (Palmeiras). As the years passed honours and fans were split between the two great football clubs. True to Brazilian culture, the fixture is awash with colour and sound.
VIDEO: Watch it all kick off after an a rather un-Brazilian tackle in the Palmeiras-Corinthians derby...
9 Olympiakos v Panathinaikos
Billed as a clash between the 'eternal enemies’ of Greek Football, passions run high on and off the field in Athens. History favours Olympiakos, the traditionally working-class club, with 12 of the last 13 domestic titles. In an echo of other European leagues, political forces are present in the club’s respective corridors of power, which simply adds to the tension in the city.
Welcome: Panathinaikos players try to dodge missiles thrown from the Olympiakos end
8 Roma v Lazio
It is perhaps surprising that such a devilish rivalry can exist in a city shared with God’s top man. Yet when Rome's best sides lock horns, all hell breaks loose. Politics and proximity have equal claim to be the source of the hate, but historically it is the decision of Lazio not to merge with three other clubs from the capital, and so creating AS Roma, that began the rift.
VIDEO: See a West Ham legend goad fans in the Rome derby
7 Liverpool v Manchester United
A struggle for the Best of British title has kept these two adversaries in battle for over a half a century. United’s dominance of the Premier League era has hauled them level with the Merseysiders on 18 domestic titles while Liverpool trump their rivals on the Continent with five European Cups to three. Culturally, too, an industrial rivalry exists between the two beacons of England's north-west.
Lancashire hot pot: Wayne Rooney gets a kick from Javier Mascherano at Old Trafford
6 Ajax v Feyenoord
They say opposites attract. Holland’s most successful clubs certainly don’t think so. On one side, the cultural, historical and liberal socialist capital of Amsterdam with a club famed for championing 'the beautiful game’. On the other is Rotterdam, a rugged, industrial city, which was the birthplace of Pim Fortuyn’s anti-immigration party, and home to Feyenoord. As a result violent fan clashes have long marred occasions when the two sides meet.
Mustard gas: Fans make it a colourful clash between Ajax and Feyenoord in Amsterdam in February
5 Barcelona v Real Madrid
You traitor: Barcelona fans throw a pig's head on to the pitch for Figo's return to the Nou Camp with Real
‘El Classico’ never fails to live up to its name. Throughout the years the fixture has brought together the planets finest footballers – Maradona, Zidane, Ronaldinho, Romario, Cruyff – in two of the world’s most formidable stadiums. Politically, too, it pits the capital of Spain against the capital of Catalonia, a fiercely independent region in the north-west of the country. Crossing the divide is hardly recommended, as Luis Figo found out. After a world record move from the Nou Camp to the Bernabeu fans threw a pig's head at him.
Fiery reception: A poster of Figo is set alight
Serbs you right: Manchester United defender Nemanja Vidic (centre) gets stuck into Partizan Belgrade during his time with Red Star
4 Partizan Belgrade v Red Star Belgrade
Out of the ashes of the Second World War, two teams were created in Belgrade. FK Partizan became the central club of the Yugoslav Army and Red Star were the civil adversary. Both can lay claim to being the supreme team in the country – it has largely been a duopoly since their inception – although Red Star’s European Cup title in 1991 sets them apart. However in a country were the game is rife with corruption allegations, this once great on-field battle has left its better days in the past.
3 Celtic v Rangers
The religious undercurrent to the Old Firm derby makes it unlike in any other fixture in the world. Away from the obvious antipathy that exists between two dominant clubs in the same city, there is a long and passionate rivalry that goes beyond the confines of the stadium. Celtic are the Catholic club with routes entrenched in Ireland while the Protestant faction of the city are linked strongly with Rangers. Between them they dominate Scottish football in a way that has led for calls for them to join the English Premier League.
Scottish grit: Rangers striker Kris Boyd shows little sympathy as Celtic's Darren O'Dea takes a tumble
2 Fenerbahce v Galatasaray
Sparks are bound to fly when football clubs are added to a city separated by a mass of water, especially when the city straddles Europe and Asia. Istanbul’s dominant sides were founded two years apart and a social rift soon added spice to the rift already created by geography. Gala were seen by many as a club for the aristocracy with Fener the ‘people’s club’.
Turkish delights: Fenerbahce's Ugur Boral (right) tries to hold off Umit Karan Sabri Sarioglu of Galatasaray
Boca Juniors' Cristian Chavez (left) vies River's Oscar Ahumada at a colourful La Bombonera (below)
1 Boca Juniors v River Plate
Spain has ‘El Classico’, Argentina has ‘il Superclasico’. And what an occasion it is. Like many other fiercely contested same-city fixtures, social resentment is as much the catalyst as proximity. From humble beginnings in the La Boca neighbourhood, River detracted to the aristocratic suburb of Nunez, earning the nickname ‘Los Millonarios’. Juniors, meanwhile, remained in the poor suburb. The entire country is gripped for days in the lead up to match day and the game kicks-off so too do 90 minutes of ear-bursting and nerve-jangling atmosphere. The fixture was recently listed as one of the 50 sporting events to attend before you die.

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10:53 AM

A DULL but dry afternoon on Saturday 30 November, 1872, saw sporting history made on the West of Scotland cricket ground – rather soft from the previous night's rain – at Partick, but the two teams confronting each other, clad respectively in navy blue and white, were not cricketers. That day's contest is now regarded as the first football international, when more than 2,000 people saw Scotland play England.

The game was a no-score draw, but it was significant, not just in being the first international, but in the way it pointed up the different playing styles of the auld enemies. Reporting on the match, the Graphic newspaper observed: "Individual skill was generally on England's side. The Southrons, however, did not play to each other so well as their opponents, who seem to be adept in passing the ball."

The Scotsman, meanwhile, reported Ottway, the English captain, "standing conspicuous, and astonishing the spectators by some very pretty 'dribbling'". But it added how "the Scotch team, though not comprising so many brilliant players, worked from first to last well together, through knowing each other's play."

At a time when brutally aggressive charges down the field by big, heavy – and public-school educated – players was the template of the English game, in Scotland a more nimble and sophisticated "passing game" was developing. It would ultimately make the individualistic English tactics as defunct as dinosaurs and shape modern football the world over.

Now a new book, Beastly Fury, is arguing against the received wisdom that football was an unruly and violent ball game civilised by public-school players during the 19th century. The author and film-maker Richard Sanders argues it was, in fact, the ordinary classes – and particularly the Scots – who civilised and sophisticated the brutal game cultivated by the English public schools, ultimately revolutionising football. The Battle of Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields of Eton, but the triumph of the refined "passing game" in modern football certainly wasn't. That first Scottish national side was essentially Queen's Park, founded in 1867 and named for the Glasgow park in which its founders played casually – many of them from north-east Scotland, suggests Sanders, rather than the YMCA members who also played there and are often credited with establishing the team.

Beastly Fury (the title drawn from a condemnation of the game dating from 1531) traces the development of the sport from medieval times, with the kind of riotous street games involving hundreds that we still see in the Eton Wall Game or, in Orkney, the Ba' Game played every Christmas and Ne'erday in Kirkwall.

Unlike some who believe this was the universal form of "folk football" – which effectively died out with the Industrial Revolution while a new "civilised" game emerged, developed by the public schools – Sanders argues that, "in short, it was not the upper class that civilised the people's game, it was the common people that civilised the upper-class game".

Not only that, he adds, but "it was in the mines and mill towns of Renfrewshire, Lanarkshire and Ayrshire that football acquired refinement, rather than on the playing fields of Eton and Harrow."

Essentially, argues Sanders, the traditional view is that folk football was barbaric and effectively died out during the Industrial Revolution, to be created in the public schools as an entirely new game, from which today's sport is descended. "But if you think about it," he tells me, "the idea that a sport that has been going for 700 years should stop altogether, and then 40 years later an entirely different sport that has no connection to it whatsoever but is also football should survive… doesn't really make sense.

"It's common sense that a thread of folk football survives and feeds into modern football. The reason why we've always thought that wasn't the case is because all the early histories were written by public schoolboys and they see it from their point of view."

Sanders is a writer and documentary film-maker, whose films have included two on football controversies – Escobar's Own Goal, concerning the shooting of the Colombian star Andrés Escobar, after he had scored against his own side during the 1994 Fifa World Cup, and Maradona: Kicking the Habit, which peers behind the extravagant façade of arguably the world's greatest footballer. He's also a Tottenham Hotspur fan. "It's a family thing, a bit of a burden for the past 20 years," he confesses dolorously.

"But I'm always interested in tracing things right back to their origins, and it's surprising that no-one's written this book before, on the origins of football. Most of the book is original research, but I'm also piggy-backing on some other people, in particular John Goulstone and Adrian Harvey, who have done a lot of work resurrecting folk football." Sanders's book may appeal even to non-fans of "the beautiful game", with its insights into British society and its attitudes. "It's a great window on late-Victorian Britain," he says.

It was only with the development of the fast-flowing, more sophisticated passing game developed by the boys from Queen's Park and others like them that football would become the sport we recognise today. As far back as 1870, Scotland was being described – and by English enthusiasts – as "the land of football". Until the First World War, nearly a quarter of all English First Division players were Scots and, as late as the 1950s, English professionals still referred to the short-passing game as "the Scottish style".

Football as conducted by the products of the English public schools of the 19th century was ferociously individualistic and aggressive. These, after all, were young men being cultivated as empire-builders. "What's so extraordinary when you look at the old public-school football games is that they're so much closer to the old mock-battle thing, and the key thing that makes them like that is their very strict offside rules. At Eton, for instance, you effectively couldn't pass at all. A player couldn't go upfield and call for a pass; that was against the rules and was known as "sneaking". Instead, you had to try and force your way through the opposition by sheer force."

It can be suggested that, to these budding captains of empire, the very concept of passing the ball to someone else could be interpreted as almost an abnegation of responsibility. "You can come up with all sorts of sociological explanations," says Sanders. "(That] game was certainly rabidly individualistic and extremely aggressive." And much of it, he reckons, boils down to the old Victorian obsessions with anything smacking remotely of undesirable practices in the dorm. "It's clear that sport and athleticism are very, very popular in the late 19th century public schools, in part because they're so terrified of all the sexual impulses teenage boys have and – and I'm hazarding a guess, really – that the slightly manic atmosphere of public school football is in part to do with sexual sublimation."

Many histories of the game, he argues, "ignore the blindingly obvious fact that the various public-school games were staggeringly violent". Cold showers apart, in the inner sanctum of the Scottish Football Museum at Hampden, curator Richard McBrearty agrees on the uncompromising nature of the English game: "If we could transport ourselves back to 1872 and watch some of the charges and heavy tackles that were allowed then, you'd be surprised.

"Queen's Park realised they couldn't compete man for man with the England team, because the England players were heavier and faster in many respects. So you could see them in the build-up to that first international match, thinking about how they were going to play the game, and they pair up – that was a big thing."

In his museum, McBrearty, who regards Sanders's approach as refreshingly objective, displays the edition of the Graphic that covered that first Scotland-England game of 1872. "What's important, he says, "is that the report mentions that the Scotland team were adept at passing the ball, and that's the first time passing is recorded in the annals of association football."

Tellingly, in one game against England in 1873, the Scots team recruited a few "exiles" from English public-school teams. Their different playing tactics broke the rhythm of the Scottish scoring machine and they lost 4-2. "Thereafter," comments Sanders, "the Scottish team was dominated by Queen's Park men. Between 1874 and 1886 they lost just once – 5-4 at the Oval – in 1879." As late as 1882 the English player, Charlie Alcock, commented that England's "disinclination to pass settled England's chances as effectively as it had done from the first of these international contests".

As English football spread beyond the public schools, the "Scottish professors", as they were known, became much in demand. An advertisement in this newspaper in October 1882 for a good full-back for a club in north-east Lancashire promises: "To a really good man… who can teach well, liberal wages will be given." A month before that, the Athletic News had suggested Bolton Wanderers should start wearing kilts and change their name to "Caledonians".

By Jim Gilchrist

Game History

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