The Maleficent Seven. These are our least lovable sports teams



News.com.au Sports Editor Anthony Sharwood describes the rationale behind his picks for the most despised sporting teams, which saw Collingwood head the list.


BEING a sports fan is about passion. It’s about loyalty and sticking with your team on a rainy afternoon when the pies are cold and your team’s form even colder.

There is beauty and passion in being a sports fan. But there is also hate.

Not a hate that manifests itself as violence, but a simmering, resentful kind of hate that sustains you and even nourishes you when your own team is playing like hell.

Here are seven teams not even a mother could love.

1. Collingwood


You knew they’d be here before you clicked, and while we’ve tried to include a few surprises on this list, there’s no point overthinking things too much. Collingwood is the very definition of loathsomeness. Like a dumb, ugly rich kid who thinks himself superior to his peers while in truth they snigger behind his back, Collingwood has no friends, no class and not a single worthy trait. Don’t be fooled by the fact that in terms of both members and match day crowds, this is Australia’s most popular sporting club. There’s no official measure of unpopularity but if there was, you’d need about ten thousand MCGs to hold all the haters.

MOST LOATHSOME OF ALL... is that line in the club song that goes “Oh, the premiership’s a cakewalk for the good old Collingwood”. The arrogance, the sheer arrogance. The delicious irony is that Collingwood do indeed often play like a bunch of loafers poncing around eating cake, especially after reaching one of those grand finals they’re so adept at not winning.

2. The Brisbane Broncos


Brisbane likes to think of itself as a mature, global city these days, a fact supported by the city being chosen to host the G20 summit later this year. Brisbane is also the rugby league capital of the world – perhaps the only city on the face of the earth which truly lives and breathes for the sport. Yet Brisbane has just one NRL team. That team, with its mystifyingly American name, is the Broncos. The Broncos are like a giant vacuum cleaner for Brisbane sporting talent. Each year, while the 10 Sydney clubs battle it out for scraps, the Broncos unearth a local superstar or several who just happened to end up in the club’s hideously ugly maroon-and-gold strip.

MOST LOATHSOME OF ALL... is the whingeing and hair pulling-out that occurs when the Broncos don’t make the finals. It’s like they’ve got some sort of birth-right to be there. For the record, they have missed finals footy just three times since their first year 1988. And they’re currently lamenting their longest premiership drought… a whopping seven seasons. Drought schmought. There are towns in Queensland which haven’t seen rain for longer than that.

3. The Adelaide Crows

From day one, when they adopted the South Australian State colours, the Crows stamped themselves as arrogance and egotism personified. Their cross-town rivals, the Power, might once have been the malevolent, evil force of South Australian state footy, but there’s something gutsy and admirable about the Power these days. Not so the Crows, who have become chronic under-achievers on the field, and

MOST LOATHSOME OF ALL… are the fans, who don’t have an ounce of sportsmanship in their delicate bones , and who routinely walk out of matches early when their little darlings are behind on the scoreboard, so they can scurry off to the nearest wine bar.

4. The NSW Waratahs


No sporting team should be named after flowers, and this particular bunch of pansies is like one of those overpriced bouquets you buy at a fancy schmancy florist, a bouquet which wilts and dies about 20 minutes after you bought it. How many times have the delicate petals in this Sydney-based Super 15 rugby outfit looked good yet failed to bloom? How many flower analogies can we fit in one piece?

MOST LOATHSOME OF ALL… is the fact that they’re looking so good again this year. Indeed they’ve won their two matches in free-flowing style yet have the best defence in the competition. That’s a sure sign that it’ll go wrong in about six weeks. It always does.

5. Team Waterhouse

They’re an unofficial “team” in the true sporting sense of the word, but the trainer of last year’s Melbourne Cup winner Fiorente and her high profile bookie son are quite the unlovable duo of the Australian racing scene. To be fair to Gai, her effervescent nature and sharp tongue can be entertaining, such as when she bagged out her old mate Singo at the More Joyous inquiry. But for the most part, she comes across as narcissistic and endlessly verbose on her favourite subject – herself. As for Tom, let’s just say that if he really knew what punters want, as he claims in his ads, he’d bugger off and get a real job.

MOST LOATHSOME OF ALL… is when Waterhouse invites punters to bet on his mother’s horses, all of which is perfectly above aboard and legal but which always seems, shall we say, a little at odds with many people’s expectations of the racing industry.

6. The Australian Swimming Team

They’ve given Australia no less than 58 gold medals over the course of our Olympic history but in recent times they’ve also given us all sorts of reasons to tune out. The blokes played up like spoilt brats in London, while half the girls were too busy updating their Facebook profiles to worry about winning medals. Unlike, say, Collingwood, this is a sporting outfit no-one actually wants to hate. But our swimmers have still got plenty to do before (and during) the Rio Olympics to convince Australians that they’re a mature bunch of young champions who are worth cheering for no matter how they perform.

MOST LOATHSOME OF ALL… is their nickname the “Dolphins”. It’s pointless having a team nickname for what is effectively a large group of individuals competing in solo or relay events. In fact, you’d probably have to call it porpoiseless.

7. Any team of drug cheats


Do we have to name names? In the past 12 months, there’s been enough written about teams in both the NRL and AFL who drag all of sport down with cutting-edge tactics taken from the Lance Armstrong playbook.

MOST LOATHSOME OF ALL… is the fact that you just know we’ve not heard the last of it, and probably never will.

http://www.news.com.au/sport/the-maleficent-seven-these-are-our-least-lovable-sports-teams/story-fnaqgujp-1226850856983

I despise Perth and i'm not really sure why tbh.

Such a typical, useless news.com.au article.

Melbourne Victory should be on this list but you know, they play bloody wogball.

Edited by milan_7: 11/3/2014 10:11:08 PM

Still sulking from that hiding the Baby Broncos gave his Tigers several years ago. :lol:

Nah m8 Sydney innit?

I hate the Melbourne Storm way more than I hate Brisbane, and this is coming from a Dragons fan who lived through the 90's including being at the 93 Grand Final (although I wasn't even 10 years old and barely remember anything).

Never get why people don't like floral emblems. They may be few but they are memorable and provide great emblems. The Waratahs, Partick Thistle, The Proteas, Nottingham Forest

Edited by chillbilly: 11/3/2014 10:46:50 PM

Bulldogs would easily be first with given their history of cheating and thuggery.

Do people hate the crows?

Surely Manchester United fits that collingwood description. For every "supporter" there would be 50 that despise them.

Sydney FC for me. Can't stand the club, can't stand the fans ( sup Heiny :lol: ).

Also the RBB are doing a pretty good job of making me hate WSW. But I enjoy Poppa and some of the players, so am still neutral on that one.

"Your sister is your mother
Your father is your brother
You look like one another
The bogan family"

Da da da dum...click click
Da da da dum...click click...

We don't hate Newcastle. You just come up on our radar once in a while.

Nice place for a swim and a bit of lunch before kickoff actually.

My dislike for SFC has nothing to do with Jerks bias.

It's the whole "biggest club in Australia" etc - when clearly Victory are (and even Roar are bigger), the insane bias and negativity from their fans on all matters, etc.

Sydney FC are the tool who keeps on talking themselves up, and delivering hilariously embarrassing results.

I think the last time anyone said we were the biggest club in Australia was when Branko said something to the effect of us being the Manchester United of Australia. That was about 6 years ago and everyone just shook their heads. I mean us Sydney fans especially. We actually don't go around talking ourselves up, but it has to be said that rightly or wrongly, people tend to talk about Sydney a fair bit. We are high profile, like it or not.

I think for a big club we actually don't go around dick measuring against everyone else. In all seriousness I can't remember many pronouncements to the effect that we are the biggest and the greatest.

The Wanderers OTOH are like kids with a new toy and are forever skiting about how great they are and how great their fans are and how thankful everyone needs to be for their existence. Which is why beating them Sat night was that much sweeter.

MV tend to do a bit of boasting as well, but that's a Melbourne-Sydney thing mainly.

As for bias and negativity from Sydney fans:

Bias - well you'd expect some bias in favour of your team, wouldn't you?
Negativity - I tend to agree with you there, and stay away from some of the negative dkheads in the stands. Sydney IS a fickle market and I find that quite frustrating.

BTW, you'll see that fickleness come to the fore in a couple of years as the gloss wears off WSW and they start losing more and more.


Edited by thupercoach: 12/3/2014 11:01:40 AM

We da best

:lol:

Thupercoach, have you ever read a Redkat post?

But we are!!! :shock: :lol:

Admit it. You got off to COYS as much as the rest of us did. :lol:

That, and I know you're butthurt over having to get me a bottle of Kraken. ;) :lol:

Brisbane Roar. Worst team and fans alive :lol:

Manly. Everyone hates manly.

The Crows? Really? Must be a Victorian thing.

:lol: there's 6 games left and we're 2 points behind, buddy

And people call us hot & cold.

But still, we da best!!! :lol:

Should I start preparing my liver for another weekend?

:lol: Yes!

Nope, worked at the MCG for a couple of years and the nicest set of fans I ever came across were Crows fans followed by West Coast fans. Crows fans are adorable old nanas with home made scarves and go on about how they bring their grandchildren to training, really though Crows fans are actually the nicest and most articulate fans I encountered. The absolute worst being Carlton fans, I saw Carlton fans get into punch ons on four different occasions with four different teams, they were the common factor.

Maybe it's just Power fans? :lol: . The Advertiser ia usually biased towards them and their fans live off the back to back GFs

I do not like Sydney Fc which might come as a shock to some :d

Mainly because I don't like people who talk the talk but cannot back it up with actions. Plus the whole QLD vs NSW thing.

You're like Scouse Roar. You claim to hate us, yet we know you love us with a burning desire.

You also love Terry McFlynn

no

:lol:

You lie like Brendan Santalab.