World Footy News

Every so often a few guys stranded in a city without footy go looking for like-minded individuals and get a kick-to-kick happening. 'Every so often' is slowly but surely becoming more regular and kick-to-kick is turning to clubs looking for a game. In the past few months Europe has seen three, possibly four new teams hoping to get off the ground, with the Trolls in Oslo and Lions in Finland, the Czech Republic and the Swedish city Linköping.

As is the case more often than not, a few Aussie expats were required to get the ball rolling. Australians living in Oslo found each other via internet postings, and earlier this year the Trolls formed. With the northern winter approaching the club will go into hibernation, but the foundations are in place to build from next year.

Asked how well recruiting has gone so far, Kurt Jensen from the Trolls replies "not very, but I think we have barely scraped the surface as far as potential for bigger and better things are concerned... I think our short-term plans involve nothing more than an end to end kick - Norway is covered with snow for at least six months in the year. We do intend to travel to sweden and denmark in the future though. Ideally we would love to have regular training schedules, and scheduled games. In two to three years' time I would hope to have about twenty to thirty blokes involved in the league".

Oslo is a little over 300km by road from Göteborg, Sweden, where the Beserkers are hoping to join the Skåne league after attending this year's Skåne Grand Final between Port Malmö and Lund, making road trips for a game within reach.

Also within a few hours' drive of Göteborg is Linköping, where early rumours suggest a club is forming to enter the Stockholm regional league in 2006. The expansion team is still to be confirmed, but it be a very positive development for the Stockholm crew, who have worked hard to build a local league since their inaugral season in 2004.

Linköping are suggested to be considering calling themselves the 'Lions' - as are two other expansion clubs in Europe, the Czech Lions in Prague and the Finnish Lions in Helsinki. Adding to the Lions-fest is the fact that both clubs are being founded by ex-Düsseldorf Lions... the coats-of-arms of the Czech Republic, Finland and Düsseldorf being some of the whole pride of Lions gracing coats-or-arms across Europe.

The Czech Lions are currently a side-project of the newly-founded CANZA, the Czech Australia New Zealand Association, which is being set up by Australian (and ex-Düsseldorf Lion) Steve Rees. So far they have about half a dozen active players after starting training sessions about halfway through this year, but the CANZA grand final function saw around 70 people attend and Rees hopes this organisation will be a great recruiting ground.

Rees explains that they are targetting a national league - the CAFL (Czech Australian Football League) - and are in some initial discussion with AFL to get their help. "We would like to see two teams, the Prague Tigers and one in Brno or elsewhere. they would still play under the banner Czech Lions in Euro comps... JD (Jakob Dedek) attempted to get Tigers going but lost the people he used to kick around with back to Oz. He is training with us now (although the season's pretty much over for this year) and will be part of the running next year. For now, the national team is the Czech Lions.

"Mike McFarlane from Canadian AFL got us hooked up with the AFL and I have received a startup pack from them. We got some balls from Big Grab Sports in Canada and a guy in the UK, reasonably cheap". They're also hoping to get a set of junior-size balls for family sports days and similar CANZA events.

The Finnish Lions are the recent project of international footy veteran Julian "Rooster" Clark. The Helsinki crew have been gathering momentum since their gathering to view the AFL grand final and are hoping to get enough assembled forces to attend the inaugral Prague Cup on November 5th.

If the Prague Cup defeats the European weather, the Cup would see five teams (Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Vienna, Czech Lions and Finland) meeting. The possibility of snow is a potential problem, but event organiser Ashley Ball is optimistic - "if it does end up cold them at least it will be a good party in a beautiful city!! Im pushing to get Sparta stadium here and that would guarantee a non-frozen ground. I'm planning on doing most of my promotion work in London at the EU championships when I'm there on the 9th of October".

Some new clubs take off and are raging successes, some never quite make the first match, but the ones that make it always make it all worthwhile.