Fandom drives people to do a variety of outwardly strange things, from scarf collecting to lucky-shirt rituals. Via the Uni Watch Blog comes a great example: billsportsmaps.com, the site of a fan who crafts his own maps of various sports leagues around the world. Some are computer-generated, some hand-drawn, and all gorgeous and oddly mesmerizing. Soccer is represented with quite a few maps, and the site is well worth a look.
I’ve been meaning to post on that site too. The NASL map from 1979 is particularly interesting for those of us who weren’t around in pre-MLS days.
Yeah he is the map man. They are very well done. I also encourage onlookers.
Ah, 1979, one of those incredibly rare occasions in which I was actually able to see a team that I support win something important.
He seems to have somehow left the Whitecaps off of the attendance list, but the champions’ crest would be even bigger had he done them on the basis of percentage of capacity. Empire Stadium is not that big, but it was often full. Indeed, if the NASL had looked beyond the Cosmos, they would have seen ample evidence for the proposition that the ideal size for a NASL ground was between 20 and 30,000. Many of the clubs with the most passionate following in the league and the best atmosphere (San Jose, Portland, Rochester), played in grounds of that size rather than in echoing NFL bowls.
Thanks for catching that, ursus arctos. I have corrected the omission of Vancouver in the attendances list on the map.
A book I highly recommend is the First World Atlas of Football by Radovan Jelinek. It was so cool that Sportsbooks in Charing Cross actually sold it in the original Czech for awhile and it sold quite well. An English translation came out about four years and it is well worth whatever price Amazon.uk is charging these days.