The majority of European countries started with their national football leagues for 2018/19 season earlier this month, including England, Slovenia, Croatia etc. If you’ve read my previous posts, you already know, I’m a Manchester United fan, so this time my main focus will be on the English Premier League, as it is the one I’m interested in the most. I might write a little about the Slovenian national league, Prva Liga Telekom Slovenije, as well, but we’ll get to that later.
Let me first write a few words about the history of football and the Premier League in England. I won’t go into the oldest recorded mentions of playing football in England, I will rather just focus on the last 150 years, give or take, so that it doesn’t get too long. The English national football association is simply called the Football Association, or just the FA in short, and it was formed in 1863. Not long after that, in 1871-72 season, teams first started to compete in The Football Association Challenge Cup, or as most of you know it, The FA Cup, which makes it the oldest national competition in the world. It was only suspended during both world wars in the 20th century, the first time between 1914-15 and 1919-20 editions of the competition, and the second, longer period was between 1939-40 and 1945-46 editions. The last final, before suspending the competition for those 7 years, was won by Portsmouth F.C., and it’s fans claim that because of that, their team has held the Cup for the longest time. 😀
At the beginning of 1990’s, a new competition was formed, called The FA Premier League. It was first played in 1992-93 season and the first winners were Manchester United. Undoubtedly, Manchester United is the most successful team with 13 titles in Premier League’s 26 seasons, if anyone would disagree with me, I have a lot of statistic information to back my claim. Unfortunately for me though, they haven’t been as successful in these past few seasons, ever since Sir Alex Ferguson retired from the team. It doesn’t matter which team you support, Sir Alex is probably one of the most recognized people these days and football fans all over the world know who he is.
If I look at the start of this season, which has been going on for almost 3 weeks now, at the time of me writing this, I do have to say that it hasn’t been that rewarding for me and all the other Man United fans. Scoring just 3 points in 3 games, and only playing up to the fans’ expectations in one of those 3 games, beating Leicester City on opening day 2:1. I must say that I haven’t seen a lot of other games, but if I take a look at just the results, there are a few surprising ones in my opinion. I can’t move past Brighton & Hove Albion winning against Man United 3:2, and another one I would point out, involves the other Manchester club, City drawing 1:1 with Wolverhampton. We’ve also seen two big derbies in these first 3 matchdays already, with Arsenal being the team to feature in both of those derbies, but unfortunately for them, they lost both games.
If you take a look at the current Premier League table, there are a few teams surprisingly high, like Watford and Bournemouth at the moment, but that’s not such an unusual thing, since the season just started and it all depends on the team’s schedule at the beginning. The season’s still a long way from over, so I hope that Manchester United do turn their form around and get back to their winning ways, maybe even become champions once again. Apart from that, I do hope we will get to see a lot of interesting games, with lots of goals being scored, I might not be able to watch many games though, but nonetheless.
And, as promised, let’s now talk a bit about the Slovenian national league, Prva Liga. I have to be realistic, we can’t really compare the general quality of football played in the Premier League or Prva Liga. We can say that the top few teams here in Slovenia could potentially go against some mid-table teams in England, but maybe just over the course of a game or two. There were games in which Olimpija or Maribor (the biggest clubs in Slovenia I would say) played against the English top tier teams, but were never really very successful against them. As Slovenia got independent in 1991, the first national league competition was held in 1991-92 season, so in that aspect, it’s a year older than the Premier League, but as I’ve already explained, there’s a whole lot more history behind the Premier League. Of course, football was played in Slovenia even before it became an independent country, but it’s history isn’t as rich or as long compared to football in England. We also have a big rivalry between two clubs, I’ve already mentioned them a few rows back, and since I was born and been living in Ljubljana my whole life, I am a fan of Olimpija. They did go through some troubled times a few years ago, but the club pulled through and it’s back to its better days. Some other Olimpija fans might disagree with me on that one these days, and honestly, I couldn’t say anything against it, but we will see what happens on thursday in Slovakia.
So to conclude this post, I do hope Man United starts playing much better soon, before it gets too late for them, as well as Olimpija qualifying for Europa League in two days time. But no matter what, it’s going to be a long season with a lot of things happening on football pitches in England and all around Europe. 🙂
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