After an entertaining 2-2 draw in Portugal last week, there’s much to look forward to in the return fixture between Arsenal and Sporting Lisbon.
Say that to any of the travelling fans, though, and they won’t be happy.
Sporting are not, as they are regularly referred to in the English-speaking press, ‘Sporting Lisbon’. They are Sporting Clube de Portugal officially, or Sporting CP, or simply Sporting. Whereas once this error was overlooked and forgiven, in recent years Sporting fans have become more militant about it. A “NOT Sporting Lisbon” campaign on social media in 2016, launched by fans and supported by the club, made this clear.
Something similar occurred with the club informally known as Athletic Bilbao. Ahead of their visit to Manchester United in 2012, a memorable game thanks to the Basques’ Marcelo Bielsa-inspired dominance at Old Trafford, the club released a statement reminding everyone that their name is Athletic Club, or Athletic, but absolutely not ‘Athletic Bilbao’.
But why does this happen? Is it English ignorance? Is it something more sinister? Or is it just convenient to include the location of the club?
First, it’s worth considering the fact that, to English supporters, it’s unfamiliar to encounter a club name that doesn’t feature a geographical reference. Of the 92 Football League clubs, it’s generally accepted that there are only two which don’t feature the name of a place; Port Vale, and Arsenal. Even then, Arsenal were once known as ‘Woolwich Arsenal’ when they played in that area of south London, before their move north to Islington in 1913.
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But every other English club is named after a city, a town, borough, a county or some kind of geographic area. We’re not accustomed to encountering clubs with more general names, like Sporting Club or Athletic Club. That said, this is largely an English phenomenon — Scotland and Ireland, for example, both feature several club names that don’t feature any geography.
So that, in itself, is not an excuse for getting things wrong. But the further complication is that both Sporting and Athletic are English words, rather than Portuguese or Spanish or Basque. And therefore, while “Sporting” to someone in Lisbon absolutely means the club who play in green and white at the Alvalade, in England it’s less clear. There’s also Sporting Gijon, over the border into Spain, for example. Although even then, of course, we could be using Sporting Club de Portugal instead of Sporting Lisbon.
For Athletic Club, it’s more complicated still. Again, Athletic is a common word in English — see Charlton, Oldham and Wigan — but unique in Spain. It’s not difficult to imagine why the Spanish consider that ‘Athletic’ does the job on its own, but the English require a bit more context, at least in certain situations.
And all this is more common than we probably think about. We often hear ‘PSV Eindhoven’, ‘Zenit Saint Petersburg’, ‘CSKA Moscow’ and ‘Partizan Belgrade’, despite the fact none of those cities are included in the official name of the club.
That said, it’s less common than it used to be. ‘Glasgow Celtic’ and ‘Glasgow Rangers’ were commonly heard until relatively recently, although are now frowned upon. They are simply Celtic and Rangers. There are, of course, several other clubs that use the word ‘Rangers’, particularly in Scotland. Some reports about Michael Beale’s decision to join Rangers from Queens Park Rangers featured the phrase “Glasgow-based Rangers”, to avoid any confusion, which felt particularly clunky.
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Elsewhere in Europe, Young Boys were once routinely called ‘Young Boys Bern’, and it was fairly common to hear, for example, Norwegian clubs referred to as ‘Viking Stavanger’ and ‘Rosenborg Trondheim’, the latter being a funny example because the club was probably more famous than the city, at least to English football fans.
A more egregious 1990s usage was the occasional sight of Lazio being called ‘Lazio Roma’, troubling both because it involves the name of their rivals, and because Lazio is the region of Italy which contains Rome, and listing region before city feels particularly odd.
Elsewhere in Italy, the club is Internazionale or simply Inter, whereas the English often go for ‘Inter Milan’, although at least in this example the full name of the club is Internazionale Milano.
Not all clubs suffer this fate. We don’t feel the need to add anything geographical onto the likes of Juventus, Galatasaray, Real Sociedad, Real Betis or Schalke.
There are some interesting specific cases. We once uniformly referred to Crvena Zvezda as ‘Red Star Belgrade’, not merely adding the city name, but translating the rest into English too. Now, it’s increasingly common to see the Serbian name.
Another is the Dutch club AZ, often referred to as AZ Alkmaar in English-language media. But AZ itself stands for Alkmaar Zaanstreek, so we’re really calling them Alkmaar Zaanstreek Alkmaar (and Zaanstreek refers to the Zaan district, just to make things more complex). It would essentially be like referring to the French club as ‘PSG Paris’.
The Swedish club AIK are referred to as both ‘AIK Solna’ (which is not their name) and ‘AIK Stockholm’ (which is geographically incorrect). Perhaps this is to differentiate them from the Greek club AEK, who we inevitably refer to as ‘AEK Athens’.
‘Bayern Munich’ is another curious situation. Munich is the English word for Munchen, of course. But we don’t similarly translate Bayern, which is the German region we refer to as Bavaria. So the English name for the club is half-German, half-English. If we were being consistent, we would go for the all-German Bayern Munchen, or the all-English Bavaria Munich. (A further complication comes when you see Italian-language publications refer to the German champions as Bayern Monaco. Bayern and Monaco have, thankfully, never played one another in official competition).
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That opens up another can of worms about whether the English name for a city should be used for the name of the club too. The English words for the cities of Lyon and Marseille used to be Lyons and Marseilles, which are rarely used these days. Even so, one English newspaper still uses those words for the football clubs, too. Sevilla are occasionally still referred to as ‘Seville’, although you rarely see Roma called ‘Rome’ these days.
All this extends to pronunciation, too. Should an English-speaking supporter pronounce AC Milan as ‘Mil-an’, as in the English name for the city, or “Mee-lan”, the way Italians pronounce the name of the club?
It takes a bit of unravelling. The club uses the English ‘Milan’ rather than ‘Milano’, because it was formed by an Englishman, and the name stuck. So really, the question is: should an English person copy the Italian pronunciation of the English name for an Italian city? The answer is debatable, but under no circumstances should they ever be simply “AC”.
Historically, you would occasionally catch sight of foreign-language media, particularly in Germany, refer to English clubs as “Chelsea London” or “Arsenal London”. This felt bizarre the first time you encountered it, but also came across as delightfully quaint, and served as a reminder that these clubs were entirely unfamiliar to some overseas readers, and a little geographic context would help them place these clubs.
That’s increasingly rare, just as we probably see less of, say, ‘PSV Eindhoven’ in the English media — there’s no other PSV, and we know where PSV are from. That probably speaks to our improved knowledge of foreign football in an age of globalised coverage. In wider terms, there can be fewer simpler ways to learn basic geography than by being an ardent football fan.
We probably see Sporting and Athletic’s city names used less frequently than in previous decades, although those supporters might continue to be frustrated by occasional mentions.
Besides, for some of us, the word “Athletic” now chiefly means the publication you are currently reading.
(Top photo: Octavio Passos/Getty Images)
