Before I dive deep into the impending relegation of my childhood club, AEK Athens, I wanted to spend a couple moments apologizing for the lack of activity on Posts By Panos. This project of mine has always been a one-man show and I take full responsibility for the lack of 'posts' on the website. Moving forward the intent of this space will still be a forum to share my uneducated thoughts on sports and life. However, the weekly columns that had become a staple of PBP, due to a lack of time on my part, will cease to exist. Thank you for your continued support and as always your feedback is greatly appreciated.
The Inevitable Death of AEK Athens
It popped up on my phone late Sunday afternoon . . . GOAL ALERT! (0-1) '86 Bougaidis Own Goal (AEK Athens 0 -1 Panthrakikos) . . . I muttered a couple choice words about a team of idiots that deserve to be relegated and then proceeded to resume my Sunday watching the Masters.
During the past two years, this is how I experienced everything AEK, via a complex combination of alerts on my smartphone and weekly phone calls with my father. Call it apathy, call it frustration, but my reasoning was if the club is going to take its supporters for granted then why should I invest the limited hours of my time in a club that is doomed to fail. Take a further step back and it is evident that as a whole, Greek soccer in its current incarnation is doomed to fail.
Greek football is eerily similar to the financial crisis Greece has suffered and continues to suffer from. Shoddy leadership, failing infrastructure, high levels of debt and the ever-challenging balance of corruption and greed are merely some of the many attributes that both share. The problem is that we all saw this coming and chose to ignore it.
Sports fans, even if you do not want to admit this, are hopeless romantics. We spend our days fantasizing about fleeting moments, moments of glory and victory. The difficult thing is that the love we have for our team blinds the otherwise apparent warts that undermine the very dreams we romanticize over. This is the dilemma for many AEK fans. While we acknowledged the faults with our club, the love we have has pushed those faults aside and we blindly continue to support . . . ahh true romance.
Before Sunday's match AEK had been experiencing the worst domestic campaign of their history. As a result of everything that is wrong with Greek football, the team sold all of its players during the summer transfer window and were relying on a group of youngsters for the 2012-13 season. With a swim or sink mentality, AEK sank to its lowest point in its very illustrious history; it was on the verge of being relegated for the first time in its history. Relegation, for the uninformed, is when the lowest-ranked teams are placed in a lower division for the upcoming season.
With this in mind, AEK hosted Panthrakikos in massive relegation six-pointer at the Olympic Stadium in Athens. Jumping ahead to the 86th minute . . . the proverbial shit hit the fan.
From Yahoo! News:
The goal triggered the angry reaction of AEK fans, with 200 of them invading the pitch and chasing all players into the locker rooms, while inflicting damage on the benches and other objects around the turf.
One hour and a half after the game came to a halt, the referee reportedly succumbed to AEK players' pleas not to abandon it, given the evacuation of the stands and the pitch, but by that time the Panthrakikos squad which had originally consented to the restart of the game, had boarded on its coach and left, having already missed their flight back home to Komotini.
This means the game is abandoned and AEK will not only lose the match with a 3-0 score but will also have three points deducted, according to the Super League rules. That would mean its mathematical relegation to the second division for the cash-strapped Athens giant, as with only one round of games left to play, AEK will find itself five points from safety.
Here are several images from the hooligans, who clearly were more interested in stealing shoes than supporting their club:
I have also included several heartbreaking images from fans and young children as the madness continued on the pitch:
The difficult part for me is that I am AEK through and through . . . we used to joke around that while our blood runs red, it is our heart that beats yellow. I was one of those children who used to go to games with my father and enjoy the entire spectacle of sports. These were the moments that unified AEK supporters. Consistently in the shadow of our more illustrious rivals Olympiakos and Panathinaikos, AEK was the underdog, a team that expressed itself on the pitch with beautiful football and always remembered its history as a club that was created on the backs of Greek refugees from Constantinople, common-day Istanbul.
I really do not know what happens next; it is a near certainty that AEK will be relegated to the 2nd division. Hopefully, the supporters will be banned for 10+ games, but knowing the politics and lack of jurisdiction in Greek football you really cannot be surprised by anything.
I guess that leaves us back at the beginning and why we all are in love with sports, because each of us are hopeless romantics. I will continue to support AEK, maybe from a greater distance, with the hope that when the club celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2024, I might be able to take my son or daughter to a game, not be embarrassed but fall back in love with a club that has failed us all.
