Europe's Capital Cities Have Struggled to Produce Great Derbies; Here's Why

The cold was biting, even given the time of year. The snow that had been forecast had graciously held off, and as Argentinian striker Carlos Bianchi began his forward run, he did so across the unseasonably lush turf of Paris’ Parc des Princes.

It was December 1978, and the Ligue 1 Parisian derby between Paris Saint-Germain and Paris FC was doing its best to warm the 21,000 freezing spectators thinly spread around the sprawling, wind-swept old ground.

Receiving the ball in space, midfielder Jacques Laposte spotted Bianchi’s movement and threaded a sublime through ball. The FC back four were flat-footed and stopped for offside, but Bianchi played to the whistle and slotted the ball past Michel Bensoussan to put PSG 1-0 up.

As Bensoussan led his team in a chorus of remonstrations, the mid-season Ligue 1 table took an ugly turn against struggling FC. Six months later, they were relegated. In 2016, they are yet to return.

December 16, 1978, was, astonishingly, the last time that the French top-flight played host to a Parisian derby. By comparison, in that same 27-year period, London has seen comfortably more than 500 derby matches contested in the English top division.

It is only a cursory stat, but it's one that bears witness to Paris’ strange relationship with a game that took root and created real fan culture in the French provinces, but that has always had to contend with a kind of muted indifference in the capital.

There was a unique evening in March 1999, perhaps the biggest night of club football in the city since Bianchi had edged FC towards the drop in the freezing cold 20 years earlier, when Paris hosted two big games on the same night.

At the Parc des Princes, PSG laboured to a leggy draw against Montpellier in Ligue 1. Meanwhile, further north in Saint Denis, Red Star 93 were going down 2-1 to St Etienne in front of a Ligue 2-record 45,000 supporters.

Red Star, founded in a cafe more than 70 years before their more recognisable neighbours by World Cup father Jules Rimet, had been moved to the Stade de France as a one-off experiment under pressure from the government, who were being bled by a deal with the stadium’s owners that entitled the latter to £7 million in compensation for every year that the arena went without a permanent occupier.

On the surface, the night bore the hallmarks of a turning point for Parisian football. Not only were PSG resplendent with a stellar lineup, but in Red Star, there finally appeared to be a rival with the kind of following necessary to propel them to genuinely competitive status within the city.

But for Jay-Jay Okocha, Christian Worns and the other household names across town at the Parc des Princes, the expected challenge never arrived. Red Star’s defeat to St Etienne walked them a step closer to eventual relegation, and they were to fall to the sixth-tier before finally returning to Ligue 2 in 2015.

Of the 45,000 in the ground that night, no more than 4,000 could have been considered Red Star regulars at the Stade Bauer, to where the club returned after the failed flirtation with the Stade de France. Most of their number had just craved the chance to spend a cut-price 90 minutes at the arena that had seen France crowned world champions a few months earlier.

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The singer Tom Waits was onto something when he said: “Not a man’s town, Paris. Not a man’s town.”

Paris isn’t alone in being a capital city far from the centre of a country’s football culture. A sprinkle of history is needed to make sense of why, though.

It has to do with migration patterns to the industrialising provinces of Western Europe during the late 19th century, which created a lot of embryonic neighbourhoods and communities that sought to put down roots all at once in their new surroundings.

One outlet for this was burgeoning new football clubs. Capital cities meanwhile have always been centres of culture, hubs of activity that have classically given football as a spectator-driven event more competition than in the provinces.

This lesson in social geography is reinforced by a look at the numbers. The Italian Serie A title has been to Rome five times, the German title (pre- and post-Bundesliga) to Berlin four times. Prior to the financial injections that elevated Chelsea beyond their natural level and butchered the pattern in 2004, London had won the title 16 times—13 of them Arsenal—but this is comfortably eclipsed by Manchester and Liverpool.

Post-1900 but pre-financial revolution at the turn of the current decade, Paris had won seven titles in France, a country mile behind Western Europe’s most successful football cities; Turin, 39 titles; Milan, 36; Munich, 27; Liverpool, 27; Manchester, 24. The capital cities of England, Germany, France and Italy can boast exactly one European Cup win between them.

Berlin is another city where there’s usually been too much going on for football to do well. The story of football here is one of constant mergers, divisions and dissolutions, predictably for a city that spent nearly 50 years of the last century torn in half. A city constantly at war with itself was always likely to provide no real consistency for sporting rivalries to emerge. So it proved.

In a country that didn’t establish a national league until 1963, Hertha Berlin had enjoyed prominent status and a record 12 regional Brandenburg titles prior to the formation of the Bundesliga. When the Cold War descended on the city, they were the only professional club in Berlin to be absorbed into the West German league structure.

For rivals Union Berlin, life in the East was less straightforward. In 1950, the Soviet authorities refused to allow the club to compete as Berlin’s representatives in the national championships, leading to a split that saw a splinter club set up by defectors to the West. After the wall went up, the western branch collapsed, leaving Union in the Soviet East as the sole custodian of the club’s legacy.

Thereafter, with the wedge of history driven between them, the rivalry was nullified. Even in the East where semi-regular derby matches did continue between Union and the newly founded Dynamo Berlin, the club of the Stasi secret police, there was little enmity worthy of the name, as Union yo-yoed between Ligas A and B while the state-backed Dynamo cantered to 10 Oberliga titles.

The only league meetings between Union and Hertha since reunification occurred during the two seasons the latter spent ignominiously in the Bundesliga 2 between 2011 and 2013, producing an unremarkable spread of results—a win each and two draws—to go with this most unremarkable of capital-city derbies.

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The most striking aspect of Berlin’s fallow football history is the dearth of success that has stalked its clubs. Hertha, despite some flirtations with Europe’s elite in the early 00s, which included a 1-0 win against AC Milan in the Champions League, have never worn the Bundesliga crown nor advanced past the early rounds of European competition.

Worse was to follow for Union, who continued, after re-unification, to chart the full trajectory of the league pyramid making it down as far as the fourth-tier in 2006 before recovering to settle in the second, but as the city’s second-best supported side, their story remains a study in underfulfilment.

Casting an ominous shadow over the whole discussion, with its 42 Spanish league titles and counting, is Madrid. But this is more than just the exception that proves the rule. 32 of those titles belong to Real, the club of the Spanish crown and more generally of the establishment.

This pattern is repeated more emphatically in the old Eastern Bloc, where communist party authorities would direct resources centrally to the countries’ best sides, which were invariably in the capital and run by one branch or other of the state.

For the rest of Europe, though, history will always carry a peculiar footnote that marginalises its cultural centres.