From Bodo/Glimt to Liverpool (Montevideo) and D.C. United: Why club names have punctuation

There are a few unusual things about Bodo/Glimt.

They play in the Arctic Circle, for a start. They’re also the first Norwegian side to reach the semi-finals of a European competition, as they prepare to face Tottenham Hotspur in the Europa League.

They’re also unusual in that their name features punctuation. It’s not every day you see a football club name with a slash in it: almost as if they’re inviting the reader to choose between Bodo and Glimt.

The story behind the name is relatively straightforward. The club is from the town of Bodo, in the north of Norway, and initially simply went by the nickname Glimt, which means ‘flash’. Then, in the 1940s, because another team in Norway had the same name, they incorporated the town and it was initially hyphenated — Bodo-Glimt, to signify Glimt from Bodo.

However, that became confusing in newspaper listings and on betting slips as people assumed it was referencing a game between two teams called Bodo and Glimt, so the slash was gradually more widely used until it became the official name of the club.

But are Bodo/Glimt a complete outlier? Are they the only club with punctuation in their name?

Well, no, clearly not. They’re not even the only men’s club with a slash in their name.

In Liechtenstein, there is USV Eschen/Mauren, the result of a merger between FC Eschen and FC Mauren in the 1960s. Confusingly, from a punctuation consistency point of view, they play in the Sportpark Eschen-Mauren.

And as longer-term followers of MLS will know, there used to be a slash in one of America’s most prominent clubs, too.

These days, the New Jersey-based New York Red Bulls ignore the geographic inaccuracy in their name but when they were established in 1994, they were much keener to ensure everyone knew where they’re from, while at the same time associating themselves with the nearby city that more people had heard of, hence the slash. In those days, they were the New York/New Jersey MetroStars but by 1998, that was deemed too cumbersome and they just went by MetroStars, no location and no punctuation attached, until Red Bull arrived in 2006.

However, while the men’s team in that area ditched their slash, the women’s team picked it up in 2021. Well, sort of. While NJ/NY Gotham FC play in NJ and have “NJ” as part of their name, you might not know it. Their club badge features a depiction of the famously New York-based Statue of Liberty rather than something from New Jersey (like, I dunno… Satriale’s from The Sopranos) and they are almost exclusively just known as “Gotham”. But still, the slash is there so, for our purposes, it counts.

Attaching a location to your club name can be a slightly tricky business, especially if the name you’ve thought of already is a location… just a location that’s nearly 7,000 miles away. The solution? Punctuation! In this case, parentheses. For example, when a group of students in Montevideo, Uruguay, were thinking about establishing a club in the early part of the 20th century, what better inspiration could they wish for than a successful club with which their city had cultural and economic ties?

Thus, Liverpool Futbol Club was born but inevitably, confusion began to emerge with Liverpool Football Club, so while this isn’t technically included in their official name, there had to be some differentiation made for a more global audience. Hence, you’ll usually see them referred to as Liverpool FC (Montevideo).

There is a clutch of other clubs whose names have taken inspiration from another, so they need to clarify where they’re actually from. There’s River Plate (Montevideo), Athletic Club (Minas Gerais), Botafogo (Paraiba) and Botafogo (Sao Paulo), neither of whom are the Rio-based, current South American champions. There are also various clubs named Al Ahly, Al Nasr and Al Ittihad, many of whom geographically identify themselves with the help of parentheses.

Maybe you’re irritated that technically most of these only apply to common usage, rather than the official names of the clubs. Fair enough. How about a hyphen, then? Look no further than Colo-Colo — or Club Social y Deportivo Colo-Colo, to use its Sunday name — the Chilean giants based in Santiago.

They were named in honour of a tribal chief from the Arauco War, which raged in Chile in the 1500s. Pedants might be annoyed to learn that some sources omit the hyphen from the club’s name, possibly because the tribal chief in question is variously referred to as Colo Colo or Colocolo, so they’re deferring to history. Or possibly because few people really care about hyphens. Either way, the club’s official website goes with Colo-Colo, so they qualify.

Chilean veteran Arturo Vidal, 37, is now at Colo-Colo (Martín Fonseca/Eurasia Sport Images/Getty Images)

Plenty more where that came from, too: Paris Saint-Germain, Rot-Weiss Essen, VVV-Venlo, Union Saint-Gilloise — we could go on.

On a similar theme, we have the good old-fashioned full stop. Here’s where you could really get into the weeds: do you count FC Barcelona, AC Milan or AFC Bournemouth here? Grammatically, you probably should, given that “FC” and “AC” and “AFC” are all initials, but practically, it looks a bit stupid, and that should usually trump restrictive linguistic rules.

It’s less stupid with a couple of MLS clubs — D.C. United and St. Louis City — given that the full stops are part of how the names of their respective cities are styled.

There are more in Germany, in the wide range of clubs whose names start with “1.FC”, which include but are not limited to 1.FC Koln, 1.FC Heidenheim, 1.FC Nurnberg, 1.FC Kaiserslautern and 1.FC Magdeburg.

In all of these cases, clubs are either the result of mergers or were one of several clubs in their particular town or city that have since gained primacy, so the “1.FC” is designed to signify that they were the first to be established in that area.

Here’s a good one: as far as we can tell, there is only one football club with an exclamation mark in their name. Or, at least, there used to be: for any non-English readers, we promise that the seaside village of Westward Ho! is genuinely real and is genuinely written like that, and they really did have a football club called Westward Ho! Athletic, but alas, they seem to have disappeared at some point in the 1990s.

As we are yet to discover a football club with a semi-colon in their name, or quotation marks (which would just make them look sarcastic: “Paris” Saint-Germain, Manchester “United”), we’ll close with the apostrophe.

These include possessive apostrophes in clubs that are named after people or institutions — Newell’s Old Boys, for example, who got their name from Isaac Newell, an Englishman who was a pioneer of football in Argentina. Or there’s O’Higgins in Chile, named after a 19th-century independence leader of Irish descent. And King’s Lynn Town, simply named after the place in southern England. And ASC Jeanne d’Arc, the Senegalese team who got their name from French patron saint Joan of Arc.

If you want to get awfully clever about things, there are other teams that have punctuation in their names without actually having punctuation in their names. Club Atletico Colon, from Argentina, for example, or perhaps the Houston Dash.

But you’ve already read more than 1,000 words about punctuation. That would probably be a step too far.

Have we missed any? Give us your nominations and suggestions in the comments below.

(Top photo: Paolo Bruno/Getty Images)

This post was originally published on this site