HistoryHistory
Olympiakos Piraeus Football Club or O.S.F.P-Olympiakos Syndesmos Filathlon Pireos (The Olympiakos Union of Piraeus Supporters)
Founded: May of 1925 (from the merging of two clubs, the Athletic and Football club of Piraeus (Athlitikos Podospherikos Syllogos Pireos) and the Piraeus Supporters' Club (Omilos Philathlon Pireos).
Colours: Red-and-white striped shirts, white shorts
Stadium: Olimpiako (Stadio OAKA 'Spiros Louis')
Capacity: 76,000 (all-seated)
League Champions: 1931, 1933-34, 1936-38, 1947-48, 1951, 1954-59, 1966-67, 1973-75, 1980-83, 1987, 1997-99, 2000
Cup Winners: 1947, 1951-54, 1957-58, 1960-61, 1963, 1965, 1968, 1971, 1973, 1975, 1981, 1990, 1992, 1999
Olympiakos are Greece's most popular and most decorated club.
The club is known as THRYLOS (or 'legend'), after their founders and original five-man forward line, the Andrianopoulos brothers. They helped the team win 4 of the first six Greek titles.
Panathinaikos Athens Football Club is Olympiakos Piraeus' biggest rival. The roots of the rivalry between these two clubs goes back to the rivalry between the two cities Athens and Piraeus in the final decades of the 19th century.
The major names in the financial world lived in the capital (Athens), as did the upper bourgeois strata of the society, senior civil servants with bourgeois habits, and virtually all the politicians in the country.
On the other hand, the working class, isolated in Athens neighbourhoods, was remote from the political developments taking place for the most part in the historic centre of the capital city and controlled by the traditional political parties.
Therefore, Piraeus developed by relying on its own. Middle-class businessmen, people who had made names for themselves in industry, commerce and shipping, in other words, self-made men, rallied around the municipality and the city's other organizations, having resolved to work together for the development of Piraeus.
Those who did not move to the bourgeois northen suburbs of Athens felt that they were living on the fringe of the capital. This feeling gave rise to its rivalry with the "paramount" Athenian bourgeois class.
The need for residents of Piraeus to confirm their unquestionably significant social and economic role would remain unfulfilled, as long as they were unable to show the Athenians the independent, sovereign nature of their local society, not to say its superiority, which implies their self-made socio-economic progress.
This rivalry between Piraeus and Athens has continued to this day through football being an outlet for the working class and very wealthy to proclaim their superiority. Games between these two clubs always fill the stadium to capacity and are always very intense and passionate events for the fans and players alike.
The only other games able to fill the Stadio OAKA 'Spiros Louis' are UEFA Champions League games when, for example, Real Madrid (the champions of Spain) come to play Olympiakos (the champions of Greece) to determine the best club team in Europe.
Official Olympiakos site: www.olympiakos.gr
Official Panathinaikos site: www.pao.gr
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