Association Football 2023/2024 Discussion Thread

[Zinneke]

We've been bought by the Crystal Palace owner, which is funny because our main rival in South Brussels was bought by their rivals Brighton's owner a couple of years ago. Incidentally, the Southern lot are attracting a hell of a lot of headlines around Europe because they are leading the Belgian league after 48 years in lower divisions.

www.irishtimes.com/sport/soccer/daydream-believer-chris-o-loughlin-s-remarkable-rise-up-the-football-ladder-1.4780752

www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2022/01/10/football-l-union-saint-gilloise-le-club-qui-sauve-l-honneur-du-championnat-belge_6108824_3210.html

www.zdf.de/sport/zdf-sportreportage/royale-union-st-gilloise-fussball-belgien-deniz-undav-doku-100.html

www.bbc.com/sport/football/59565216

I'm in two minds. On the one hand Belgium needs a feel good story given most of its league has been exposed as corrupted and several senior officials from big clubs (mainly Standard but also Anderlecht, Bruges and Gent) are accused of money laundering and false scouting contracts to pay their managers in the black.

On the other hand Union have a rather vomit inducing habit of attracting a certain type of South Brussels person who also plays hockey and doesn't follow or understand football fan culture outside of the Red Devils. Not to mention their growing legion of well to do expats sniffing for an attempt at looking like working class heroes, who don't understand a word of the chants, which I as a son of eu-immigrants-but-not-quite-expats who took the time to integrate into Belgian culture and learn the language, makes me engage in knee jerk Zemmourian reactionary thoughts.

Anyway they beat Anderlecht yesterday, which is always a Good Thing.

[Zinneke]

Anyone for cycling?

[Zinneke]

Chelsea embarrassed again, this time against Southampton, 2-1.

Jorginho is the most overrated player on the planet

[Zinneke]

Ajax - Union Berlin is tasty, reckon Mayor Halsema will follow her Belgian counterpart and try to ban all Germans from Amsterdam for that.

[Zinneke]

Ajax - Union Berlin is tasty, reckon Mayor Halsema will follow her Belgian counterpart and try to ban all Germans from Amsterdam for that.

Why? Will be trying to go to the away game. Hope they wouldn't reciprocate a move like that.

It's the latest trend amongst certain mayors to ban any fanscene that is remotely a bit on the rough side. Leuvens mayor saw their UEFA van and banned not just them from the stadium but the whole city and gave orders to the police to interrogate Germans. Halsema is capable of similar...see also : her ban of PSV fans for ... reasons...

[Zinneke]

It's the latest trend amongst certain mayors to ban any fanscene that is remotely a bit on the rough side. Leuvens mayor saw their UEFA van and banned not just them from the stadium but the whole city and gave orders to the police to interrogate Germans. Halsema is capable of similar...see also : her ban of PSV fans for ... reasons...

As a football fan I am obviously opposed to nonsensical bans, but Halsema's 'reasons' to ban PSV fans were quite solid. In every Ajax-PSV game since 2017 they had chanted antisemitic songs and they had been warned countless times. I obviously don't think there should be a blanket ban on PSV supporters visiting the Arena from now on (just like I disagree with the blanket ban on Feyenoord and Ajax supporters visiting the Klassieker away games), but the ban for this game was completely reasonable. (Wish there had been a ban on organizing the game itself, but that's a different story...)

I get that if PSV fans sung the Hamas Joden Aan Het Gas song they don't deserve sympathy ...at the same time collective and especially pre-emptive punishments for me are an absolute no-no. And also there's a big difference between a whole away stand singing choice song like Beerschot coming to ours and their whole away block singing "vak vol makkaken" and a group of the stand with political motivations singing their song. I don't want to be held responsible for the far right thugs in my stand.

[Zinneke]

My local team Racing White Daring Molenbeek may get promoted this weekend if we beat Anderlecht's under-23 side.

As the name suggest we come from the most unfashionable district of Brussels (the only stadium other than Charleroi's where you have high rises surrounding it). We regularly have racist chanting against us despite a plurality of our support being white flight Brusseleir and very far from being left-wing if anything. When we had "vak vol makkaken" ["you're a stand full of monkeys"] chanted at us by Vlaams Belang cosplay retards Beerschot this season, we turned up to their place like this :



We've been through something like 5 bankruptcies, mergers, name changes, etc so much so that wikipedia has a timeline of all the football clubs that took on the mantle of "that club from Molenbeek".

In one of our previous incarnations when I started going, we had a good project going but led mad politically incorrect ex-player Johan Vermeesch. He decided to name the team FC Brussels and wanted to buy Anderlecht's stadium and turn it into apartment blocks to have a "1 club for 1 city". He also unfortunately clashed a lot with the organized support over a range of issues and had a racism scandal. A total egomaniac who split the fanbase and drove FC Brussels into the ground.

We then had our stadium stolen by a Sheikh's football money laundering operation led by an insane but somehow competent agent, John Bico, who when ordered to share the stadium with us, would deliberately padlock the gates to the entrance of the stadium and feign ignorance, while leading his side to the Belgian first division, only to have them denied a liscence because Molenbeek commune stripped him of the stadium. Our President, Thierry Dailly - who played for us and the other traditional club in Brussels, Union Saint-Gilloise - started the new pheonix project with his son volunteering to sell tickets to see us initially play our home games in Wetteren, way outside of Brussels, until we finally took "the Temple" back from the Sheikh and Bico's hands after they lost their licence. His son is now in the roster of the team.

Now Dailly has sold up to John Textor, yet another American with a multiclub ownership structure, who may drive us into the ground for the 6th time or bring back the glory years. But we still turn up to the Temple every other week and bring more away numbers than half the first division.

I'm telling this story because Americans will never know what it feels like to see your club get relegated, disappear, have to start from scratch, or have insane figures drive them into the ground and yet still see yourself work through the ranks and have the rollercoaster ride of jumping from division to division - franchise football is not football!

and to the rest of you give hope to all those others who will see their club get relegated or face insolvency in the near future as is often the case this time of year.

[Zinneke]

Dutch hooliganism is at an all time high...wtf are they putting up their noses to do such brazen actions...still better than the Italian way i.e go around in a moped and stab scarfers with weapons.

Hooliganism used to actually have a code of not attacking random people.

[Zinneke]

Dutch hooliganism is at an all time high...wtf are they putting up their noses to do such brazen actions...still better than the Italian way i.e go around in a moped and stab scarfers with weapons.

Hooliganism used to actually have a code of not attacking random people.

I thought having a code to hooliganism defeated the point of being hooligans.

Absolutely not, many countries' hooligans have explicit rules and some even organise forest fights where you have to be the exact same number of combattants on each side.

Obviously there are still blockheads who riot spontaneously in every country (usually revolving around the same c**ntmagnet teams) but the vast majority would not attack a family section for example.

Only the Netherlands with this year's massive rise in antisocial behavior for some reason, and Italy where they love to use knives to attack foreigners, is it particularly bad in Western Europe. And i'd still say in Eastern Europe its not as bad either, despite have clearly more insane politicised types in the stands that are tolerated more in the football culture itself. Polish hooligans still only exclusively attack other hooligans in the most part.

[Zinneke]

I advise any football fan who takes a fleeting interest in the wider football world to watch what happened on the last day of the Belgian pro league. Literally 3 different champions in the last 5 minutes. Insane drama.

[Zinneke]

After last night, credit where credit is due....


...I am a beautiful man