Jorge Porbillas wrote:

QUOTE:
You should be able to name the team just from a sponsors' name: Hitatchi, Anti-Smoking, Talbot, Holstein etc.

er, why? I can never be bothered to remember who's sponsoring my team, let alone anyone else's.

Because, as kids, we all knew - I'm not on about teams now, in fact the sponsors must be pre-1990.

Naming sponsors is getting dangerously close to being brand-conscious, though.

And stadium names - where do we stand with things like the Fitness First Stadium (it'll always be Dean Court to me)?

boris wrote:

QUOTE:
Naming sponsors is getting dangerously close to being brand-conscious, though.

Not sure about that - I didn't even know what Hitachi did when my brother was running round in his Liverpool top.

Jorge Porbillas wrote:

QUOTE:
Because, as kids, we all knew - I'm not on about teams now, in fact the sponsors must be pre-1990.

When I was a child, there was no shirt sponsorship in England. Are you going to start talking about Bagpuss now?

All these threads essentially boil down to "you can't be a real football fan unless you're exactly the same as me".

Gangster Octopus wrote:

QUOTE:
Jorge Porbillas wrote:

QUOTE:
Because, as kids, we all knew - I'm not on about teams now, in fact the sponsors must be pre-1990.

When I was a child, there was no shirt sponsorship in England. Are you going to start talking about Bagpuss now?

Emily was quite cute ...

An absolute pile-driver from Bignutz.

Nail and head obliterated.

Although I'd plead guilty to being nerdish about football I think this is heading in the wrong directon. An entrance exam for football lovers has to start with the actual game itself.

Can you get enjoyment from a shot, save, goal, tackle? Can you appreciate a full-backs positioning? Do you get tumescent whilst watching Cambiasso's goal against Serbia & Montengro for the fortieth time?

Applause to Nil for his thoughts.

I'd like to see the exam include a short piece of Creative Writing describing that moment at your first live game when you walked up the stairs and saw, for the first time, the pitch....

What stairs?

Funny all this talk of the irritating term "Gooner"; that's had a very strange evolution. Twenty-plus years ago it was the name of the North Bank's main hoolie firm but it became very quickly sanitised in the post-Premier League era so that you soon had the Fast Show's brilliantly accurate late-90s football fan pastiche bloke going "I'm a true blue Gunner Gooner." Bushwhackers, headhunters, soul crews and ICFs never got so comfortably co-opted did they?

Harri Saer wrote:

QUOTE:
No, Man U is acceptable. It's the most concise, meaningful abbreviation and it reminds me of being seven.

No. It really isn't.

QUOTE:
When I was a child, there was no shirt sponsorship in England. Are you going to start talking about Bagpuss now?

Bagpuss - 1974

Hitachi sponsor Liverpool, the first such deal involving a major club (Kettering, actually, were the first a couple of years earlier, but it was a local double glazing firm or somesuch) - 1979

It was Kettering Tyres, and they tried to get away with it by deleting the "yres" after the League complained, though that ruse only lasted for a few months.

So it's agreed then. You can only be a real fan if you bought a replica shirt before they had sponsors' names on them...

It's more of 'gets on my tits' thing rather than anything else, and I'm sure I'm guilty of doing something similar when it comes to other foreign clubs but literally every time I see the term 'Real' instead of Real Madrid or Madrid I inwardly shudder.

By the way, I quite like the term 'footie'. No one has ever explained properly their a