The Athletic section of the NY Times is doing a series of articles I can’t resist. It began last Monday with Villans, Cherries, Toffees and Tractor Boys: The origins of English football club nicknames (archived), which begins:
What’s in a nickname? That is a question The Athletic will be answering this week as we trace the origins of football clubs’ monikers in England, Germany, Italy, France, Spain and the rest of the world.
They start with Arsenal, whose nickname “the Gunners” comes (as every schoolboy knows) from “the club being formed by a group of 15 workers from the Royal Arsenal munitions factory in Woolwich,” and proceed through the rest of the Premier League (I did not know Nottingham Forest was called, inter alia, the Garibaldis); then they drop down to the lower leagues, my favorites of which are of course Stockport County and Luton Town, both called the Hatters.
The second entry, on French nicknames (archived), is full of boring color names (Les Noirs et Blancs, Les Bleus et Blancs, Les Rouges et Blancs, and for variety Les Verts), but there are some pretty good ones: LOSC Lille are Les Dogues (The Mastiffs), and Montpellier Herault SC are La Paillade (the name of a district in Montpellier). Much better are the German ones (archived): Bayern Munich are Die Rekordmeister, FC Hollywood, and Bestia Negra (for beating Real Madrid more often than any other side from outside Spain), Augsburg are Die Fuggerstadter, Bochum are Die Unabsteigbaren (the undescendables, because they held onto their Bundesliga status for 22 seasons), Bayer Leverkusen are Die Werkself (the factory eleven), Borussia Monchengladbach are Die Fohlen (the Foals), and Freiburg are Die Breisgau-Brasilianer (the Breisgau Brazilians, because they were accomplished and watchable in the ’90s).
The Spanish nicknames are good too (archived): Barcelona fans are culers or cules — meaning ‘those showing their backsides’ — because “Passers-by looking up would see a long row of bums seated along the wall at the very top of the stand”; Real Madrid are sometimes Los Vikingos (‘the Vikings’); Real Valladolid “are sometimes known as ‘Los Pucelanos’, an old name for that city.” This one is particularly interesting to me:
Valencia are nicknamed ‘Los Che’, with ‘Che’ being a colloquial greeting traditionally used on Spain’s eastern coast, roughly equivalent to ‘mate’ or ‘buddy’. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, immigrants brought the expression to the Americas, where their descendants continued to use it, including Argentina-born Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, who got his nickname from amused Cuban comrades.
Is this true? I always thought “che” was purely an Argentine thing! Moving on to Italy (archived), we find that Juventus are La Vecchia Signora (The Old Lady), Napoli (alongside the better-known Partenopei) are O Ciuccio (The Donkey), and Crotone are the Pitagorici (Pythagoreans). You’ll have to click through for the various origin stories, some of which (needless to say) are more plausible than others.
“ I always thought “che” was purely an Argentine thing! ”
Those of us who have had the privilege of living in Argentina know that they invented whatever the Welsh didn’t care to be bothered about, but..
If Val is an abbreviation for valenciano,
“ che2
De la interj. che, con que se llama a personas y animales.
1. interj. Val., Arg., Bol., Par. y Ur. U. para llamar, detener o pedir atención a alguien, o para denotar asombro o sorpresa.
From the Diccionario de la Lengua, RAE
Of course, Les Bleus is the French men’s national team, whereas the women’s team is Les Bleues. I want to hear someone say, 《j’aime Les Bleues, pas Les Bleus, parbleu!》
The England men’s team are occasionally called “The Three Lions” (the eponymous 1996 hit song named after their crest) but mainly by hacks varying elegantly. The women’s team are to all and sundry “The Lionesses”, number unspecified.
Of Hattic interest, Danbury, Connecticut was once the self-proclaimed Hat Capital of the U.S. or perhaps the world. Which is honored by the “official” name of a current minor-league team there playing a more violent-yet-civilized game than soccer: https://www.danburyhattricks.com/
Play up, Pompey
Paws up, Pompey
Dodge Pompey
Portsmouth
I always liked the nickname Naranja Mecánica that Spanish press created for the Dutch national team of ’74. The World Cup was not so long after the release of Kubrick’s movie.
That’s great!
Probably the greatest team never to win the World Cup.
The NY Times seems to be subcontracting some its reporting. Such as sports. Also, some photos appear without captions identifying the individual(s) shown and the date.
“
che
(D’orige onomatopèyic.)
* interj. Interjecció típica valenciana que s’usa per a donar a entendre reaccions de sorpresa, entusiasme, enuig o uns atres sentiments.
* La terra del che, Valéncia.
* s. m. i f. Persona valenciana.”
source:
Diccionari General de la Llengua Valenciana
Wow, I had no idea. Thanks!
As the Chief of my household is from Nottingham, and keeping H.Rider Haggard’s She in mind,
(“She Who Must Be Obeyed”), I looked up the Garibaldis of Nottingham Forest.
In my (broadly defined) neighborhood of Barcelona, El Tío Che is a beloved horchatería founded over a century ago by a guy from La Nucia — in the province of Alicante and thus the autonomous community of Valencia — who according to family lore came to town in order to embark for Argentina, but eventually didn’t. Both he and the business are presumed to have gotten their moniker because he’d peddle his exotic drink by telling passers-by “Che, prova!”
Those color names may only seem boring. Roma are the giallorossi, named for the orange and maroon colors of their jerseys.
Some internet sources try to fudge it by calling their colors “carmine red and golden yellow”. Special pleading. They’re orange and maroon.
Oh, I don’t have anything against color names — I root for the albiceleste, after all. But they’re not as dramatic as names like Garibaldis and Breisgau-Brasilianer.
@Ryan:
In Italian, I doubt even the most diehard Lazio fan would deny they’re shades of rosso and giallo. As colors of the city, they’re understood to be rosso porpora and giallo ocra, the latter standing in for gold.
The RAL colour standard agrees they are shades of red and yellow, though if Wikipedia is to be trusted it calls them “carmine red” (RAL 3002) and “Dahlia yellow” (RAL 1033), using “purple red” and “ochre yellow” for close but more brownish shades (RAL 3004 and 1024).
But then that standard was created and remains administered by Germans. Native English speakers may have different views.
In particular, I’m pretty sure English has a notion of “purple” that’s systematically bluer than Italian. It’s always been jarring to me that in English one can normally say (if I haven’t been misinformed) that Catholic bishops wear a purple choir dress. In Italian they most definitely don’t, both because their dress is violet (technically, paonazzo) and because purple denotes a cardinal’s dignity. The color that immediately comes to mind as porpora Is nonetheless rather bluer than a cardinal’s dress, but it’s still definitely a shade of red and not a bright violet.
I don’t really know where other European languages stand on this, but French Wikipedia claims that in French too the purple range is redder than in English — or at least used to before malign computer-driven English influence. It certainly seem the case that rojo púrpura and rouge pourpre — and also Purpurrot if I can trust RAL —are ordinary colors in a way I doubt purple red can be.
I sort of assumed it worked somehow in Italian but I think it’s funny in English.
It also seems the expression of giallorossi varies from year to year. The 2000-era Totti jersey I have shows significantly more orange and maroon than the colors in the logo online and in some but not all online player photos.
Galatasaray SK goes by the popular name Cimbom (pronounced as spelled: /dʒimbom/). For examples, see the list of recent headlines here, picked at random. This name comes from the chant Re Re Re Ra Ra Ra Gassay Gassay Cim Bom Bom! (as heard here, for instance; ‘Gassay’ = Galatasaray). Various accounts have been put forward to explain the origin of this Cim bom bom!. Apparently, in issue no. 7 of the club’s official magazine, Galatasaray Dergisi, it was once explained that the Cim Bom Bom! was introduced by Sabit Cinol, a midfielder for Galatasaray in the 1920s. As the story goes, Sabit Cinol had previously played for Servette FC in Geneva, and there was a centre-forward on the team whose nickname was Jim. (I just did a quick search of lists of players for Servette stretching back to 1901 and it didn’t yield any players from Anglophone countries named James, or anything else like that.) The spectators had a cheer specifically for this Jim, something like Jim Bom Bom!, wherever that came from… In any case, Cinol is said to have brought the cheer back to Turkey, and it somehow would up in the Galatasaray chant.
Corrections and more precise details welcomed—this is just what I gleaned from some YouTube videos on the topic in Turkish that I just watched.
Giacomo – it may just be me, but I don’t make a very strong distinction between “violet” and “purple”, if asked I suppose I think of violet as simply the bluer side of the purple spectrum . Which I suppose goes to your point.
Much better are the German ones
It may disappoint you to hear that most of them are rather journalistic elegant variation than nicknames anyone uses who is not a sports reporter not wanting to repeat the club’s name five times in a row in two minutes. No ordinary fan or football-interested member of the public is going to say “Morgen spielt der Rekordmeister gegen Wolfsburg” or stuff like that, except maybe ironically.
I never heard “Breisgau-Brasilianer” for Freiburg, but I didn’t live in Germany for most of the 90s. “Die Unabsteigbaren” is more a taunt, but I guess taunts count as nicknames (Bochum hovered at the bottom of the Bundesliga for long years and had several near-brushes with relegation, so unabsteigbar “unrelegatable” became a chant of Bochum fans, until one day the miracles stopped happening and Bochum was relegated. After that, the chant became an embarrassment and the name a taunt.)
The only real nickname here is Fohlen, which is used by fans and non-journalists (I can confirm that as lifelong Borussia fan). It’s due to their policy of nurturing young players and selling them on when they become successful, which brings in money, but also means that Borussia never manages to build a mature team that could play at the top of the league like in the glory days of the 70s and early 80s.
@GP: German sides with Italian here – purpur is on the red side of what English speakers call purple. Maybe this is another of those linguistic cases of “English versus Continental European”.
I wouldn’t have said French uses “pourpre” at all, outside of Byzantine emperor’s or whatever – “violet” is the equivalent in normal speech.
@Lameen
I suppose you read this in lycée…
Mignonne, allons voir si la rose
Qui ce matin avoit desclose
Sa robe de pourpre au Soleil,
A point perdu ceste vesprée
Les plis de sa robe pourprée,
Et son teint au vostre pareil.
https://www.poesie-francaise.fr/pierre-de-ronsard/poeme-mignonne-allons-voir-si-la-rose.php
XKCD 2010 color survey has “purple” centered on RGB #7e1e9c and “violet” close by on #9a0eea
Hans: Thanks for the clarification. The journalistic elegant variation doesn’t surprise me — it’s probably a standard feature of sports coverage everywhere. I just read a Richard Hershberger post on Facebook where he points out that the Philadelphia Athletics of the 1870s were not called the Quakers (many modern writers think that was an alternative team name), it was just that sportswriters didn’t want to keep repeating “Athletics” and “Philadelphias,” so they occasionally used “Quakers” because that was a common term for people from Philadelphia.
No mention of the Biscuitmen. That’s Reading, because of the biscuit factory.
On colour nicknames: i believe that black and white vertical stripes earned both Collingwood (Victoria, Australian rules) and Newcastle (England, association football) the nickname Magpies.
On other themes: South Sydney (NSW, rugby league) got their nickname the Rabbitohs apparently from the players, who supplemented their income by selling rabbit meat on non- playing days.
The giallorossi colors are very similar to the colors of the Washington Commanders (formerly Redskins), which are generally called burgundy and gold. Maroon seems better than burgundy for that color, though it’s not as dark as maroon would typically be. The gold color is too yellow for me to call it orange (maybe orangish yellow).
To avoid burdensome repetition when playing Chicago, the Red Sox should be referred to as the Yankees.
For our friends across the water, adam has found an original way to get tarred and feathered in Boston.
The writer must have thought that the longtime “unofficial” nickname of “the Yids” associated with Tottenham Hotspur was just too boring and obscure to be worth journalistic mention.
(There’s a scholarly literature and everything: http://www.qualitativesociologyreview.org/ENG/Volume62/QSR_18_3_Wilczynska.pdf)
In the U.S. and I expect elsewhere there is in addition to the journalist’s love of “elegant variation” a felt need for short-form nicknames that will fit more easily in headlines where you want to keep total character count to a minimum. Thus e.g. “Bucs” for the Pittsburgh Pirates, which I remember being puzzled by as a boy.
To avoid burdensome repetition when playing Chicago, the Red Sox should be referred to as the Yankees.
It’s unclear to me why the Yankees are referred to as the Yankees. Wikipedia sez:
But why Yankees?
Actually, I think we should go back to “Invaders.”
I was very amused the first time I heard the San Francisco Eighteenfortyniners referred to as “the Niners”.
Was there ever a team in the Old South named the 61ers?
@mollymooly: “Sixers” for the (basketball) Philadelphia 76ers (not “1776ers” even in the most formal contexts) is so ubiquitous that folks from that metropolitan area would be puzzled by anyone finding it amusing. Apparently the minor-league (basketball) Delaware 87ers (now the Delaware Blue Coats) were known as the “Sevens” not “Seveners,” but their comparatively brief tenure with the 87er name was decades after I’d moved away so I don’t know I ever heard anyone talk about them out loud. The minor-league (baseball) Oklahoma City 89ers gave up that name after 1997, apparently, and I don’t know how they were familiarly referred to back then.
Sevens
Seveners are quite a different thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevener
(The chart of the relevant schisms is almost as good as that of the Church of Scotland.)
But why Yankees?
Just a synonym for “Americans”, and not inappropriate for a place as far north as New York?
Just a synonym for “Americans”
Ah, that makes sense. But then we must ask: why “Americans”?
Oh, of course — because they were the American League team. Duh.
But then we must ask: why “Americans”?
My guess – because the Highlanders were New York’s American League team as opposed to the National League New York Giants.
If the New York “Invaders” became the “Yankees” then I assume “Yankee” was understood at the time as a Union Soldier, rather than an old time New Englander, probably of the Congregationalist faith, which is what it mostly means in New England (as a child in New Hampshire I couldn’t understand how a New Yorker could claim to be a “Yankee”).
Question is why the New York Highlanders/“Americans” were subsequently given nicknames that seem to reflect a Civil War perspective. Did Southern rivals take exception to the presumption of a team from New York assuming the general “American” moniker as a nickname and start calling them the Invaders? Or did the Giants fans start that as an insult towards the upstart team (my guess)? Did Invader then became associated with invading Union Armies by association?
For our friends across the water, adam has found an original way to get tarred and feathered in Boston.
And, he might well be drawn and quartered in Chi-town for suggesting that the White Sox are a professional baseball club, unlike the resurgent Cubbies. 😜
Yankee Doodle — Yankee was just any American. Only became northern in the Civil War, when southerners decided to be un-American. When did the meaning switch to New Englander? Maybe with Twain’s Connecticut Yankee?
I’ve wondered just how vulgarly yankee doodle was understood when the redcoats sang it about the continental soldiers, whatever the origin. It sounds like a euphemism for wanker – someone who is yanking on his doodle.
There are a lot of amusingly quirky minor league baseball team names in the U.S.: Savannah Bananas, Montgomery Biscuits, Columbus (GA) Catfish, Louisville Bats, Modesto Nuts, Albuquerque Isotopes, among many others.
https://faroutliers.com/2007/06/21/quirky-minor-league-team-names/
Some Japanese teams also have unusual names tied to local specialties: Tokushima IndigoSocks, Kochi Fighting Dogs, Ehime Mandarin Pirates. The startup Nagasaki Saints didn’t last long.
https://faroutliers.com/2019/12/27/shikoku-island-league-team-names/
I still like to call the Nippon Ham Fighters the Ham Fighters. The Iranian-Japanese pitcher Yu Darvish and current superstar Shohei Otani both came up through the Fighters org.
I still like to call the Nippon Ham Fighters the Ham Fighters.
Me too!
I took in a game by the Modesto Nuts while in California in 2023 and acquired a t-shirt. It appeared that 2024 was going to be the team’s last season under that name because the ownership could not agree on a new lease for the stadium (owned by the city of Modesto) with the implication being that the team would likely relocate elsewhere in California. But then they signed a one-year extension for 2025 but 2026 remains uncertain. When I was there in 2023 there also appeared to be some half-hearted attempt underway to rebrand the team as the Modesto Mariners (they’re currently a farm team in the Mariners’ system) but that seemed like a really stupid idea to me. (Nuts are in fact a key part of the local economy – if you approach Modesto on a small road rather than interstate you will pass through lots of orchards, if that’s the right word, of almond trees etc.)
There’s also a practice of “stunt” renaming where a minor-league team will take on a different pseudonym for a game or two, with different jerseys to match, as a marketing ploy. I saw the Staten Island FerryHawks (who should have been named the Pizza Rats!) play a game this season sub nomine “the Irish Farewells.” (It was “Irish Heritage Night.” Plus fireworks. But it was getting late so I hopped on the first ferry as soon as the game ended and watched the fireworks from the stern of the ferry as it crossed the harbor toward Manhattan.)
I’m only vaguely aware of this “Irish Farewell” slur, but shouldn’t you have hopped on the ferry during the seventh-inning stretch?
“I support the Cleveland Ind— igoSocks”
I know you’re all bored with colours, but I didn’t see Barcelona FC as “blaugrana”.
Thanks, Giacomo Ponzetto, for the link. I needed to see it spellt “Xe!” for it to make sense.
In North America sports teams generally have names rather than nicknames – it’s not giving them names in Europe that creates a gap to be filled often unofficially. But one Euro-style on this side of the Atlantic might be Les Habs/Habitants for the Montreal Canadiens. (Wikipedia says they also have a buncha other nicknames I’ve never heard of, including “La Sainte-Flanelle” and “Les Plombiers.”)
For those unfamiliar with this granular breakdown of the meaning of Yankee: Elsewhere in the world, a Yankee is an American. In America, a Yankee is a Northerner. In the North, a Yankee is a New Englander. In New England, a Yankee is a Vermonter. And in Vermont, a Yankee is someone who eats pie for breakfast.
In America, a Yankee is a Northerner.
In the South, a Yankee is a non-Southerner.
14 years after XKCD’s pioneering crowdsourcing of name/colourspace mapping, a blue-green boundary survey has gone viral. A violet-purple-red survey can’t be far behind.
In South America, a Yanqui is a southern Nordamericano
Those in the mood for quasi-epic poetry can read the several hundred lines of “Yankee Land and the Yankee,” first publicly recited at the centennial celebration of the Connecticut Historical Society in 1840 by its author the Subsequently Reverend* Daniel March (1816-1909). Slightly contra Brett,** it is a specifically New-England-centric work, but gives no pride of place to Vermonters. In light of the author’s subsequent clerical career it is perhaps noteworthy how *secular* an account of the Yankee character is given in the poem.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Yankee_Land_and_the_Yankee
*He had not yet been ordained to the ministry of the Congregational Church at the time of this composition and public reading. He did in later life write a few hymns in a somewhat different register that may have entered standard American Protestant repertoire.
**The account Brett gives may of course have arisen later when the true undiluted Yankee character had been largely displaced by various changes of historical circumstance (including mass immigration of different sorts of people) in the more populous and urban and lower-elevation parts of New England but still survived in the rural periphery.
> In South America, a Yanqui is a southern Nordamericano
Chingar, no! Un Yanqui es meso-nordamericano
I think we should go back to “Invaders.”
sign me up! (as a boston-area-raised brooklynite child of a ’55er Dodgers fan, it comes easily to me)
i wonder whether being specifically the “Highlanders” (independent of the intended referent) fed into the emergence of the “Yankees” name – differing slightly with Brett insofar as i’d say a lowland vermonter is no more quintessentially “yankee” within new england than someone from rhode island, while a downeast mainer is as firmly so as someone from the northeast kingdom. (i’m not sure about how northern/highland new hampshire fits into this-all, mainly because on my mental map it’s not a place with much of a population)
I would say in New Hampshire for the most part “Vermonter”=“relocated New Yorker” and is not a “Yankee” at all.
Even worse, Vermonters tend to have rhoticity and everyone knows a true Yankee speaks the non-rhotic Yankee dialect (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_New_England_English)
“Why is Portsmouth Called Pompey?” gives several proposals and the earliest known attestation on March 23, 1898.
https://www.welcometoportsmouth.co.uk/pompey.html
Some baseball teams before major league came to California: the San Jose Prune Pickers, the Fresno Raisin Eaters, the Santa Cruz Sand Dabs and two L.A. teams (bitter rivals) the Fats and the Slats.
I don’t know about anybody else, but I would root hard for the Slats.