Groundhopping24

 It's been a quiet start to 2026, but then the start of the year in a footballing sense is almost non-existent around these parts. Barring an excellent Spring Break trip to Belgium, I've barely had time or money to burn with random trips to various towns and cities across Czech Republic and Slovakia. Add to that, a newfound weekend hobby involving darts, in which I'll likely be biding my time between various groundhops and darting tournaments going forward. In early February, I had considered a return to Trenčín, but my finances had other ideas. Instead, I'd opted to play in a knockout dart tournament, narrowly losing 5-4 in the last leg despite pulling it back from 3-0 down, and having a match dart. Later on in the month, I'd long planned that to be the weekend I'd tick Jablonec off, but given Zbrojovka will likely be travelling there next season anyway, I opted to stay in Brno and win my first darts match - a highly enjoyable 3-2 success.  With only Zbrojovka...

 When you think of football in Prague, it's likely the first name that pops into your head is that of either Sparta or Slavia. Those of a more hipster distinction may think of the likes of Dukla, Bohemians, or  Viktoria Žižkov. But of course beyond these five relatively big dogs is a whole world of footballing history in the Czech capital. Beyond the B teams (and rather farcically, the one C team in Slavia Prague C), the third tier A division has four Prague teams - Loko, Admira, Aritma, and Motorlet. For today's blog, we'll be visiting Admira, with the aim of visiting the others at some undefined point in the future. Though an early start would likely have me questioning my sanity, there was an end goal in that I'd be visiting friends in Prague, and hopefully seeing the Optical Illusion Museum I'd been meaning to visit for a while. As for the football, Admira are enjoying the better season of the two sides up in sixth, though promotion is highly unlikely for either...

Arguably the best place to watch a game in Brno!  A couple of week's ago, I had a look at just how sizable the jump from the fifth to the fourth tier was, at least in terms of the South Moravian region. One of said teams in that discussion was Tatran Bohunice, who were one of two teams in the last five years to make the jump to the third tier. Based in the eastern part of the city, Tatran's stay in the third tier was all too brief, as they dropped immediately back to the fourth tier in 2024. Prior to the weekend, however, Bohunice were in an excellent position, with only Artis Brno B ahead of them by a couple of points. Having won a midweek game in hand against Pelhřimov 1-0, it's looking like a three-horse race between Artis, Bohunice and Znojmo for promotion to the third tier, although there are a few teams lurking on the outside who could put a run of form together and trouble the top three.  Looking at goals scored in Divize D, Artis B have scored a staggering 36 in 1...

Sparta Brno Having won promotion from the South Moravian fifth tier last season, it would be fair to say Sparta Brno have adapted reasonably well so far. In many ways, it's fortunate that they occupy one of the six fourth tier divisions in which only there's only one relegation place - Divize D. For whatever reason, only D and E have one relegation spot, which thankfully for Sparta is occupied by a seemingly hapless Havlíčkův Brod who are already seven points adrift without a win going into the weekend's action. But before I go into another return visit to Sparta Brno a year on from my last, I thought it might be interesting to look into how all the previous victors of the JMKP (the South Moravian fifth tier) have made the step up. Just how great is the step up from the fifth to the fourth tier in Czech football? The class of the JMKP - where are they now? 2024/25: Sparta Brno We'll start with the runaway winners of last season's JMKP, and the focus of today's b...

A quaint spot just outside the ground.  When considering the title for this blog, it was essentially a choice between an Amy Winehouse reference, or an AC/DC reference. Naturally I went for the former, as I much prefer Winehouse to a band whose singer legitimately sounds like Elmo. In any case, it's still perhaps a little too subtle, especially for those unfamiliar with Winehouse's seminal 2006 album. All that said, after a disappointing and dull trip to Vienna last week, I was staying a little more local this week via the half hour train up to Blansko, and things weren't looking so rosy so far this season. Before the game, only Polánka, Karviná B, Slovácko B, and Hlučín are keeping Blansko off the bottom of the MSFL, with the former of these actually having beaten their kind hosts 3-1 a couple of weeks back. That said, there have been three wins so far - at the aforementioned Karviná B (1-2), at home to Vsetín (2-0), and a huge one at Unie Hlubina (0-4).  As far as every...

An average beer, but a lovely place to 'enjoy' it  With Zbrojovka again playing at home on the Saturday of this weekend once again (Rymarenko ole!), it was down to Sunday to offer me the chance of visiting somewhere new. On this occasion, I opted to take the train north two hours or so to the town of Šumperk, which according to Wikipedia was both industrial and historical in equal measure. For whatever reason, its name on the railway station departure board always stood out to me. The name itself comes from German origins (Schönberg), roughly translating as 'beautiful hill', which given its location in the Hanušovice Highlands, makes a lot of sense. The football club ply their trade in Divize F, which is the regional fourth tier of the Silesia region, though they switch regional divisions often given their location which could reasonably fit in any one of the three Moravia-Silesia divisions.  They've also been switching between the fifth and fourth tiers throughout ...

 Those who know me well enough will know I'm a sucker for an amusing auto-translation courtesy of Google. For instance, I've bored people to death with tales of what some of my students surnames were translated as via the web browser: Crookedhead, Hobby, and perhaps my favourite of all, when I covered a class with a student named Richard the Poodle.  Rest assured that isn't limited to just students or names, but also towns and football clubs - for example, I've had Rosice auto-translate to dew, Svratka auto-translate to vomit, and my favourite of all, Dosta Bystrc-Kninicky - a club in the fifth tier - translate to Enough Quick Witted Bookworm.  Now it was the turn of Olympia Ráječko, for whom the village they represent has somehow managed to give me two excellent translations. As you'll gather from the title of this blog, they are Little Paradise or Little Tomato - choose your fighter carefully young warrior... In any case, it was to be the final part of an eventful...

Josef Mazopust; arguably the greatest Czech footballer of all time.  For many people, Dukla Praha will only be a familiar name to a certain kind of British hipster, given that the club lend their name to indie outfit Half Man Half Biscuit's renowned 'All I Want for Christmas is a Dukla Prague Away Kit'. That said, there's a hell of a lot more than what meets the eye with this club, who've endured highs and lows to extents that would make Portsmouth's recent history look like a succession of top half Premier League finishes. This is a club that, after all, have two founding dates on their Wikipedia page - 1948 and 1998. So before we even begin to look into this weekend's fixture of choice - Dukla Praha v Hradec Kralove - let's dive into one of Czech Republic's most complicated teams.  Initially founded as ATK Prague in 1948 ( Armádní tělovýchovný klub , which translates as Army Sports Club), the club won eight league titles in the first seventeen year...

For those that only casually observe Czech football, you may have noticed a new team in the Czech Second Tier (the FNL, not to be confused with the NFL). In fact, you may have noticed four new teams in Hanácká Slavia Kroměříž (who were legitimately promoted from the MSFL), Ústí nad Labem (who were legitimately promoted from the CFL, despite not needing to play their promotion play-off against Domažlice), Příbram (who swooped in to take Vyškov's licence), and Artis Brno (who as you can probably tell from the title, have simply changed their name). Although there is a huge issue with Artis Brno, in that they've actually done more than simply change their name - they've changed their entire identity in more ways than one. Back in May of this year, after months of deliberations following a takeover from Czech billionaire Igor Fait, SK Lišeň were no more. Despite some healthy progress on and off the pitch since their promotion to the FNL in 2018/19, the club became Artis Brno....

The 2025/26 season is officially upon us, and for this week's blog, I'm heading down a different path from the norm. Last season, I made a Czech kit ranking into a Twitter thread , but this season, I'm turning it into a blog - mainly because there's currently too much month at the end of my money to attend the games I'd initially planned to attend and subsequently write about. Add to that the fact that the game I'd planned on attending and writing about has been called off because of the weather. I must now own at least twenty football shirts, and I'll gladly admit collecting them is a bit of an addiction. Despite calling myself a Zbrojovka fan, the only Czech shirts I own are a Sigma Olomouc home shirt from 2021-22, and a Czech national team shirt. Zbrojovka's shirt for this season may be the next one for my collection - perhaps in future I'll do a blog on some of my personal favourites in that collection. But for now, here's a ranking of all si...