That’s pretty much it: will there be any brothers, first cousins, even (very unlikely) fathers and sons on the same pitch at the same time, whether on the same team or on opposing teams, in major European soccer/football next season? How common is this over there?
For whatever it’s worth, brothers on different teams aren’t particularly rare over here. One cite I found suggested that, over the centuries, 400 brothers have been on MLB rosters at the same time. And it took until the late 1980s, but at least two sets of father and son (Ken Griffy Sr. and Jr. and Prince and Cecil Fielder) have been on the MLB roster at the same time.
YMMV but baseball and football aren’t commonly viewed as equivalent sports.
Fr’instance; how many father/son pairs have been on the same NFL roster?
Father/son on same team hasn’t happened at senior level with AFL. The nearest was Ted Rankin who retired in 1910 and his son Bert debuted in 1912 with Geelong.
From memory of threads on the Dope, there have been father/son pairs in the NHL.
I can hardly even think of any NFL father/son combo being in the league at the same time, let alone on the same team. All the more so considering that it’s unheard-of for a player to enter the NFL before reaching or exceeding college age (i.e., being at least in one’s 20s,) whereas in the NBA you can skip college and go straight to pro basketball after high school, like LeBron.
What that means, then, is that any NFL father-son combo would be something like 40+ and 20+ years old.
The age differential would be equivalent in any sport.
I would have thought the proportion of two brothers/sisters playing major league football/soccer together or opposed would also not be “particularly rare”, in fact be more likely than in the US on the basis of there being more teams.
There have been many brothers playing in the Bundesliga, even twins (the Kremer and the Bender twins), but don’t think there ever was a father/son pair playing at the same time. Very few people here have kids before their twenties, and the usual retirement age for a footballer is around 35 (40+ players happen, but are very rare), so the math doesn’t work.
Too late to edit: maybe the most successful pair of brothers were Fritz and Ottmar Walter, both playing for FC Kaiserslautern. That was before the foundation of the Bundesliga, but they both were members of the sensational German 1954 WC winning team. Fritz was the star, captain and best footballer of that team, a German legend comparable with Franz Beckenbauer. He was the mid-field strategist, the Toni Kroos of the 50s.
Sorry to post so much in a row, but I had one more thought. Though there are no cases known to me of father/son playing in the same team, what has happened are fathers coaching their own sons, the latest example being Pal Dardai and his sons at Hertha BSC Berlin. I think this is a tough situation for everyone involved, like a teacher having their own kids in class. Everybody, the team mates and the public/fans, will suspect nepotism, and that’ll make it twice as hard for the sons getting into the team.
There is also the Boateng brothers (they are half brothers, though FWIW everyone I know doesn’t use the term) who ended up on different National sides Ghana and Germany:
IIRC they played against each other in at least one world cup
Tax dodger and Bayern Munich capo Uli Hoeneß had a brother who played for the German national team, but not at the same time. He also has a son who is a (very successful) Bundesliga coach.
In the AFL down here in Oz, there are a couple of coaches coaches - Chris Scott and Brad Scott - who are not only brothers, but identical twins. You could easily picture an absurdist comedy movie there.
There is another pair of identical twins, current players, who play on different teams. For the last few seasons, things have conspired (injuries, team selections etc) that meant one or the other would have to pull out of every game where the brothers were meant to be playing against each other - to the extent that theree was a fun ‘conspiracy theory’ that there was actually only one person pretending to be two different footballers.
(Unfortunately, theye did both play in the same game a couple of weeks ago.
Damnit ).
The Griffeys, yes, but not the Fielders. The father, Cecil, last played in the majors in 1998, when his son, Prince, was only 14 years old. Prince did not make his major-league debut until 2005.
I am sure I posted this recently, but Canterbury-Bankstown first grade Rugby Leage team in the New South Wales competition in the mid 70s had 3 Mortimer brothers (Chris, Peter and Steve) on the field during four Grand Finals. No soccer but still remarkable.
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