I know that professional soccer originated in clubs, so Arsenal FC is the Football Club that originated near an arsenal (or whatever, doesn’t really matter). But I see clubs with names that leave me a bit baffled. Like Real Madrid; I know that “real” is Spanish for “royal,” so maybe it was originally the Royal Madrid Athletic Club or whatever. But what about Inter- ? As in -Milan or -Miami? Miami is likely copying Inter Milan’s name in MLS’ half hearted bid to be more European. But does/did it mean anything? From context, it looks like “Inter Milan” means “another Milan team to play against existing Milan teams.” Or am I missing something? What about -City? -United?
Any team with the name United, excluding MLS fakery, was at some point formed from 2 or more other teams.
City and Town pretty self-explanatory.
So Manchester United means that two or more clubs merged to create that team. And Manchester City means that the club chose to name itself not after a neighborhood or landmark, but the whole city? Makes sense, thank you.
These are all largely, and simply, whatever words the teams chose to use to describe themselves back in the day (often in the late 19th and early 20th centuries), and with no particular rhyme or reason to why – i.e., don’t assume that a particular word in a football club’s name always means a certain thing. A lot of times, the words do seem to have been originally chosen to differentiate between different teams located in a given area.
“City” (e.g., Manchester City, Birmingham City) is apparently often chosen because the team wanted to “represent” their city, but likely has no bearing on them being “official” or anything like that.
“United” may often indicate that the team was, at one point, the result of a merger, but not always. The “United” in Manchester United seems to have been chosen because they wanted to represent the entire area; AFAICT, it was not adopted as the result of a merger of two teams (but I’m happy to be proven wrong).
“Inter” in “Inter Milan” is a shortening of “Internazionale;” the team was apparently founded with the idea to attract foreign players.
Ok thank you, this makes sense now.
Not that anyone cares, but MLS is the wrong place for team names like that. The teams did not come up organically from neighborhood clubs; they were all chartered in 1995 or thereafter. So “FC Dallas” doesn’t really mean anything, nor do most MLS team names. And it seems that fans are split over favoring the Euro convention (FC This, City That) or the American Convention (City then Mascot, like Chicago Cubs or Boston Red Sox). Virtually none of us like the current system, which is a mix of both.
Oh, absolutely. When MLS was first founded, their teams all had more “typical” North American team names, in the [City] [Nickname] format. As time has gone on, in an effort to tap into American soccer fans’ interest in non-American soccer leagues and teams, they’ve adopted faux versions of foreign naming conventions.
So this actually a bit complicated and dark. It was originally granted the title Real by King Alphonso XII but then reverted to just plain Madrid during the republican period, and only returned to being called Real when fascist dictator Franco beat the Republicans in the Spanish civil war. During Franco’s regime Real was considered “his” team.
Conversely the term “athletic” is closely associated with the Basque identity and teams like Athletico Madrid were repressed during Franco’s regime as part of his oppression of Basque (and non Castilian) culture generally.
There’s no real (pun intended) “proper” way for MLS to name its teams. If it sticks to the North American convention then the league would be starkly different from Euro and other foreign leagues. If it adopts the European convention then we wind up with what we have now, which is to say, meaningless names that invoke the phrase “MLS fakery.”
I suppose one possible solution, which nobody but me is going to like, is to retcon all of the team names (with a few exceptions, more on that in a moment) to what they might be had they originated organically as a neighborhood club and then organized professionally. St. Louis would be a perfect example: the city’s Italian neighborhood, The Hill, provided about half of the men who compromised the roster for the USMNT in the 1950 World Cup, and all they did was beat England 1:0 in probably the biggest upset in football history. So The Hill AFC. Failing that, I suppose we could name the teams for the neighborhood or nearby landmark to where they play. So for St. Louis it would be Slightly West of Downtown SC or maybe Union Station FC. For Chicago Fire it would be South Loop FC.
Or every team can just be Houston City SC or St. Louis City SC. Oh, wait…
Clearly the situation needs some more thought. Give us another 70 years and when we’ve finally had a century of professional soccer under our belts we’ll have figured something out.
This is false for the most famous “United” team in the world.
As I pointed out earlier:
*Atletico
Sorry, just drives me mad when British commentators/pundits are constantly inserting a fictitious ‘h’ into their name when they say it.
If anyone is a nerd, try to come up with every suffix for English clubs. There are 22 different ones. 22!
Sheffield Wednesday, one of the oldest football clubs in the English Premier League (and the world) has an interesting history.
Originally a group of amateurs, ‘The Wednesday Cricket Club’ (supposedly formed in 1820, and named after the day of the week on which they played) wanted to branch out into football to keep the team fit and together during the winter.
And so, on September 4, 1867, at the now-demolished Adelphi Hotel in Sheffield, a general meeting was held where the decision was made to form ‘The Wednesday Football Club’.
They would re-name to their current title of ‘Sheffield Wednesday’ in 1929.
It is however true for Newcastle United, which was formed by merging two separate Newcastle teams.
It’s true for most European “Uniteds.” It’s just annoying when a eursnob will say “actually, in real footballing countries that have history and aren’t full of rubes, United is the result of two teams uniting. Also we call it football because you play with your feet.”
I didn’t know that there were even 8841761993739701954543616000000 English clubs, let alone suffixes.