Post by Macmoish on Jul 5, 2011 7:13:03 GMT
The current FourFourTwo (which I haven't seen) lists "the 25 most hated teams of all time"
"Elsewhere, we uncover the 25 most hated teams of all time. No one liked them, they didn’t care – and from catenaccio-crazy Inter in the 1960s to modern-day moneysplashers Crawley Town, they’re all here. "
fourfourtwo.com/blogs/fourfourtwoview/archive/2011/06/29/from-the-manager-you-love-to-the-25-teams-you-hate-via-the-maddest-man-in-football.aspx
Wales on Sunday
"No one likes us": Cardiff City named as one of the UK's most hated clubs
by Steve Tucker, Wales On SundayJul 3 2011
The eccentric reign of Sam Hammam at Cardiff City has seen the Bluebirds labelled one of the most hated clubs in football history.
FourFourTwo magazine has included the Cardiff side of 2000-01 in its list of 25 of the most hated and reviled outfits ever to grace the beautiful game.
It means the Bluebirds take their place alongside Don Revie’s “dirty” Leeds of the 1970s, the corruption-riddled Marseille of the early 1990s and even England’s flops at last summer’s World Cup.
It seems Hammam’s ambitious claims and plans during his first season after arriving in the Welsh capital were more than football fans outside of Cardiff could tolerate.
Even some of the Bluebirds faithful raised a few eyebrows as the Lebanese businessman insisted their club could emulate Barcelona and set about wooing the Swansea fans into one big Celtic family.
According to this month’s edition of FourFourTwo: “A pervading sense of capital city arrogance has always made it easy for Welsh fans to loathe Cardiff, but the arrival of Hammam as chairman in 2000 upped the hatred a notch or six.
“If Sam wasn’t promising to make the entire Welsh nation support the Bluebirds he was pretentiously describing his new club as the ‘Barcelona of Wales’.”
After accusing the Bluebirds of having a bonkers leader, hostile fans and the attitude of big-time Charlies, the magazine concludes: “The chairman gave Cardiff a bad name all of his own.”
Plenty of Cardiff fans have themselves questioned what place Hammam will take when the history of the club comes to be written.
By the time he was pushed out in a December 2006 putsch led by Peter Ridsdale, the club teetered on the brink of administration.
Hammam’s years in charge had seen the Bluebirds establishing themselves as a Championship side after years in the doldrums, but at what cost?
The club even today is not free of the £24m of loan-notes taken out by Hammam from a shadowy organisation named Langston during his time in charge.
But, for some, Hammam remains some kind of messiah who took a club in which no-one seemed to have the slightest interest and shook it partially from its lethargy.
To rank his Cardiff side with the likes of General Franco’s Real Madrid or the detested secret police-run Dynamo Berlin of the mid-1980s seems harsh, but FourFourTwo commissioning editor Louis Massarella is in no doubt Hammam’s Bluebirds have earned their place.
And he believes Hammam’s courting of some of the more notorious elements of the Cardiff support also played a factor.
“Cardiff were already known for hostile fans so you throw in a chairman making grandiose claims and you’ve got the reasons right there,” said Massarella.
“I think in terms of other teams getting on Cardiff’s backs, Hammam’s behaviour certainly raised the bar a great deal. He definitely put the spotlight on Cardiff which can be a good or bad thing.
“Hammam, of course, was one of those characters who felt there was no such thing as bad publicity. He was a very divisive character within the game.
“Whether he was a good thing for Cardiff is still open to discussion. I think the jury is still out on that one, even in Cardiff itself.
“I do think perceptions of the way he was operating at Cardiff were enough to add to the notoriety the club already had in many people’s minds.
“It’s hard to imagine how Swansea fans felt when he arrived and told them they should be supporting Cardiff instead. It must have come as a very unwelcome shock.”
But Hammam’s calls for a “Wales United” side based in the capital were not just a matter of rhetoric.
Early in his tenure he took his life in hands and travelled to Pontardawe to appeal to Swansea City supporters to join the “family”.
It was a quixotic effort coming off the back of a statement of intent – rendered even more preposterous in light of the Swans’ promotion last season – which read: “Swansea will never be a big club and if they are honest with themselves they will say so. If their fans are really Welsh and want to see top class football in Wales, they should recognise that this (Cardiff) Welsh club is the only one with a cat’s chance in hell of making it.
“They should be proud of Wales first and therefore support this club. Swansea and Cardiff should join together to give the Welsh people the chance of being something.”
That Hammam was not lynched by bemused locals was a miracle, with the only response to Hammam’s 90-minute speech being from one Swansea fan present who observed: “He wanted us to be part of his family, which we refused.
“He’s obviously got something lacking to think it will ever happen, but he’s certainly got guts to come down and meet us.”
Hammam did make good on one promise to the Swansea faithful, eventually paying for their fans to travel to Cardiff for a rare, but under-whelming, derby clash in the short-lived FAW Premier Cup final in 2002.
Whatever the hatred, Hammam’s first season in charge at Cardiff generated in other quarters it did prove a successful campaign for the Bluebirds on the pitch.
Under Bobby Gould and then Alan Cork the Bluebirds finished second, earning promotion from the basement, and scoring a mammoth 95 goals in the process.
Indeed, that Cardiff vintage may have now booked its place in the hall of infamy, but many Bluebirds fans will look back on that campaign as one during which, after decades of neglect, something started to stir in the Welsh capital.
www.walesonline.co.uk/footballnation/football-news/2011/07/03/no-one-likes-us-cardiff-city-named-as-one-of-the-uk-s-most-hated-clubs-91466-28983656/#ixzz1RDFIPbfJ
"Elsewhere, we uncover the 25 most hated teams of all time. No one liked them, they didn’t care – and from catenaccio-crazy Inter in the 1960s to modern-day moneysplashers Crawley Town, they’re all here. "
fourfourtwo.com/blogs/fourfourtwoview/archive/2011/06/29/from-the-manager-you-love-to-the-25-teams-you-hate-via-the-maddest-man-in-football.aspx
Wales on Sunday
"No one likes us": Cardiff City named as one of the UK's most hated clubs
by Steve Tucker, Wales On SundayJul 3 2011
The eccentric reign of Sam Hammam at Cardiff City has seen the Bluebirds labelled one of the most hated clubs in football history.
FourFourTwo magazine has included the Cardiff side of 2000-01 in its list of 25 of the most hated and reviled outfits ever to grace the beautiful game.
It means the Bluebirds take their place alongside Don Revie’s “dirty” Leeds of the 1970s, the corruption-riddled Marseille of the early 1990s and even England’s flops at last summer’s World Cup.
It seems Hammam’s ambitious claims and plans during his first season after arriving in the Welsh capital were more than football fans outside of Cardiff could tolerate.
Even some of the Bluebirds faithful raised a few eyebrows as the Lebanese businessman insisted their club could emulate Barcelona and set about wooing the Swansea fans into one big Celtic family.
According to this month’s edition of FourFourTwo: “A pervading sense of capital city arrogance has always made it easy for Welsh fans to loathe Cardiff, but the arrival of Hammam as chairman in 2000 upped the hatred a notch or six.
“If Sam wasn’t promising to make the entire Welsh nation support the Bluebirds he was pretentiously describing his new club as the ‘Barcelona of Wales’.”
After accusing the Bluebirds of having a bonkers leader, hostile fans and the attitude of big-time Charlies, the magazine concludes: “The chairman gave Cardiff a bad name all of his own.”
Plenty of Cardiff fans have themselves questioned what place Hammam will take when the history of the club comes to be written.
By the time he was pushed out in a December 2006 putsch led by Peter Ridsdale, the club teetered on the brink of administration.
Hammam’s years in charge had seen the Bluebirds establishing themselves as a Championship side after years in the doldrums, but at what cost?
The club even today is not free of the £24m of loan-notes taken out by Hammam from a shadowy organisation named Langston during his time in charge.
But, for some, Hammam remains some kind of messiah who took a club in which no-one seemed to have the slightest interest and shook it partially from its lethargy.
To rank his Cardiff side with the likes of General Franco’s Real Madrid or the detested secret police-run Dynamo Berlin of the mid-1980s seems harsh, but FourFourTwo commissioning editor Louis Massarella is in no doubt Hammam’s Bluebirds have earned their place.
And he believes Hammam’s courting of some of the more notorious elements of the Cardiff support also played a factor.
“Cardiff were already known for hostile fans so you throw in a chairman making grandiose claims and you’ve got the reasons right there,” said Massarella.
“I think in terms of other teams getting on Cardiff’s backs, Hammam’s behaviour certainly raised the bar a great deal. He definitely put the spotlight on Cardiff which can be a good or bad thing.
“Hammam, of course, was one of those characters who felt there was no such thing as bad publicity. He was a very divisive character within the game.
“Whether he was a good thing for Cardiff is still open to discussion. I think the jury is still out on that one, even in Cardiff itself.
“I do think perceptions of the way he was operating at Cardiff were enough to add to the notoriety the club already had in many people’s minds.
“It’s hard to imagine how Swansea fans felt when he arrived and told them they should be supporting Cardiff instead. It must have come as a very unwelcome shock.”
But Hammam’s calls for a “Wales United” side based in the capital were not just a matter of rhetoric.
Early in his tenure he took his life in hands and travelled to Pontardawe to appeal to Swansea City supporters to join the “family”.
It was a quixotic effort coming off the back of a statement of intent – rendered even more preposterous in light of the Swans’ promotion last season – which read: “Swansea will never be a big club and if they are honest with themselves they will say so. If their fans are really Welsh and want to see top class football in Wales, they should recognise that this (Cardiff) Welsh club is the only one with a cat’s chance in hell of making it.
“They should be proud of Wales first and therefore support this club. Swansea and Cardiff should join together to give the Welsh people the chance of being something.”
That Hammam was not lynched by bemused locals was a miracle, with the only response to Hammam’s 90-minute speech being from one Swansea fan present who observed: “He wanted us to be part of his family, which we refused.
“He’s obviously got something lacking to think it will ever happen, but he’s certainly got guts to come down and meet us.”
Hammam did make good on one promise to the Swansea faithful, eventually paying for their fans to travel to Cardiff for a rare, but under-whelming, derby clash in the short-lived FAW Premier Cup final in 2002.
Whatever the hatred, Hammam’s first season in charge at Cardiff generated in other quarters it did prove a successful campaign for the Bluebirds on the pitch.
Under Bobby Gould and then Alan Cork the Bluebirds finished second, earning promotion from the basement, and scoring a mammoth 95 goals in the process.
Indeed, that Cardiff vintage may have now booked its place in the hall of infamy, but many Bluebirds fans will look back on that campaign as one during which, after decades of neglect, something started to stir in the Welsh capital.
www.walesonline.co.uk/footballnation/football-news/2011/07/03/no-one-likes-us-cardiff-city-named-as-one-of-the-uk-s-most-hated-clubs-91466-28983656/#ixzz1RDFIPbfJ