Do you know your Deportivo Moron from your Insurance Management Bears? Let Nick Moore be your guide…
Major League Soccer has kicked off once more. But it seems like even the boring, corporate side of football has managed to reach the other side of the pond.
Those silly Americanised club names have mostly been weeded out, now. Monreal Impact are simply CF Montreal. Dallas Burn dropped the Burn. Sporting Kansas City were known as the Wizards, while the New York/New Jersey MetroStars have become oh-so European with a Red Bull takeover.
Still, MLS sides had nothing on this lot…
1. Insurance Management Bears, Bahamas
Bears are a great animal to evoke when you’re trying to suggest power and prowess in a sporting arena, but they’re less suited to the field of insurance management – they’re not a level-headed beast, frankly, and their paws would crunch the calculator.
Nevertheless, a tedious firm in Nassau have taken ownership of a team on the holiday island and opted for the grizzly as their icon. We will leave our insurance management affairs in the hands of a nice middle-aged Irish lady called Margaret though, thanks.
2. Portman Kunis United, USA
FourFourTwo’s favourite film about mentally troubled ballerinas is definitely Black Swan – it’s a kind of Ballon d’Or in tutus. Luckily for us, the box office-smasher has also found fans in Division 11 of the Dallas Indoor Soccer League, where a side has been named after co-stars Natalie and Mila. There’s a lot to be learned from their nifty footwork, lads.
3. Eleven Men In Flight, Swaziland
Swaziland’s football’s top flight – the Swazi Premier League – is awash with delightfully odd football team names: Green Mamba, Royal Leopards, Mhlumi Peacemakers, Young Buffaloes, Mhlambanyatsi Rovers – while further down the tiers you’ll find Never Die and, er, Manchester United.
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Eleven Men In Flight, however, get top prize: they have a badge with a jet on and the club motto is ‘Easy By Night’. Who fancies getting the red-eye to Sikteki to see them face the Umbelebele Jomo Cosmos?!
4. 4.25 Sports Team, North Korea
The April 25 Sports Team, are named after the date of the North Korean military’s founding and remain its official club.
April 25's main rivals are a club called Amnokgang. Amnokgang belongs to the Ministry of People's Security, meaning that there's a beef between the military and the police on the pitch.
5. Taumata FC, New Zealand
Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu – I’m the Scatman!
Named after a hill in New Zealand, this 40-syllable disgrace of a town name translates enjoyably as: “The summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the slider, climber of mountains, the land-swallower, who travelled about, played his nose flute to his loved one.”
The big knee-having climber of mountains, mother of dragons, breaker of chains, taker of throw-ins is also a keen supporter of a bang average football team, who are the only realistic rival to North Wales side Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch when it comes to being awkward for fans to chant the “by far the greatest team, the world has ever seen” song.
6. FL Fart, Norway
The international language of trumping being amusing extends as far to Vang, Norway, where a non-league side have a badge of a whoopee cushion and a stadium called the Fartbana. The side was once left over £300,000 in a windfall from a fan, leading to the Mirror headline “FART WINDFALL”. The LOLs must never end…
7. Deportivo Wanka, Peru
We may as well get this one over with: the outfit nicknamed Los Wankeros are genuinely derived from the Wanka tribe, an indigenous people who speak the Quechua language and were once part of the Inca Empire.
They sold 1,000 shirts in the UK after The Sun ran a side-splitting story about them in 2006. Sorry about that, amigos – Kelvin MacKenzie is an absolutely whopping masturbadora.
8. Deportivo Moron, Argentina
Oh, fair enough, we’re almost as childish as the tabloids. Moron is part of Buenos Aires – they have a Bishop of Moron and a Moron University – but it’s best known for its Primera B Metropolitana unit Deportivo, whose jerseys have BINGO MORON plastered proudly across the chest.
9. Club Destroyer’s, Bolivia
The Santa Cruz outfit are irritating for two reasons: firstly they’re essentially a Bolivian Rochdale, who’ve mooched around the lower leagues forever and never won anything, which makes their show-off name seem like empty braying.
Worse, though, is that redundant grocer’s apostrophe, which is making our OCD-ridden fingers twitch over the delete key. Aaaaaargh!
10. Miscellaneous, Botswana
Botswana might miraculously have the edge on even Swaziland when it comes to deranged team names, with Kanye Swallows, Green Lovers, Extension Gunners, Galaxy and Two-Two-Five – which sounds worryingly like a confusing rival to this very website – all in the running. But Miscellaneous FC, based in Serowe, stand out for failing to even be arsed to come up with a specific name.
Their Wikipedia page does, however, claim that they are legendary for their club announcer DJ Spin Spin who is “know to hype the crowd with slamming beats and up-tempo bass drops”. Play something various!
11. FC Santa Claus, Finland
The Lapland-based third-tier Finnish unit take their title from the elf slave labour-powered international gift distribution figurehead. They wear red, of course, and the badge has the Big Man himself examining a list of grammatically poor crayoned demands for Paw Patrol figures from spoiled little bastards in Watford.
12. Prima Ham FC, Japan
Like Holland, many of Japan’s teams were works outfits, and thus have clunky titles thanks to essentially being the equivalent of Screwfix FC or World of Leather United. Prima Ham were arguably the worst, having been founded at a Mito-based sausage factory, but then they then went and spoiled it by changing the name to the slightly less fun HollyHock FC.
13. Crab Connection, Trinidad and Tobago
T&T is also home to Joe Public FC, owned by FIFA racketeer supreme Jack Warner, but the now-defunct Crab Connection were even dodgier: their president was alleged drug gang leader Merlin Allamby. He named the side after his dancehall and funded them to the top of the T&T tiers, but got himself murdered in 2008, thus ending the Crab Connection fairy story.
14. Club Atletico Aldosivi, Argentina
Founded by men called Allard, Dollfus, Sillard and Wiriott (all of which sound like things Kim Jong-un would call Trump), the quartet took the first two letters from each of their names to form an irksome portmanteau. The story runs that the ‘Wi’ was changed to ‘Vi’ because there was no W key on the telegraph that typed the news. Vankas.
15. Cape Coast Mysterious Dwarfs, Ghana
You might not think dwarves are that intimidating – sports franchises prefer Giants, as a rule – but in Ghanaian voodoo, mmoatia are terrifying, 1ft-tall forest dwellers. They’re known for being tricksters, possessing a phenomenal knowledge of herbs, and having their feet on backwards – which surely wouldn’t help in a difficult tie against Hearts of Oak.
16. Botswana Meat Commission FC, Botswana
Shut it down, people, we have a winner. Inevitably from Botswana, they’re dubbed after the regulatory body responsible for the slaughter of beef in the Lobatse region. Surely a meaty cup clash against Prima Ham FC must be arranged?
Nick Moore is a freelance journalist based on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. He wrote his first FourFourTwo feature in 2001 about Gerard Houllier's cup-treble-winning Liverpool side, and has continued to ink his witty words for the mag ever since. Nick has produced FFT's 'Ask A Silly Question' interview for 16 years, once getting Peter Crouch to confess that he dreams about being a dwarf.
