UEFA Europa League - Club Brugge KV

FCB have a glorious history of goal nets and, like NK Maribor, went to extreme lengths to keep their stanchions when box nets were deemed a necessary requirement.

In the mid-60's Brugge sported stanchions of a curve that suggested the Latin influence of Madrid and Santiago and would lead to similar at Feyenoord.



By the late 70's FCB were a force in European football and played between skinny A-frames that were classically Low Country.




The A-frames were still there in the mid-90's and the era of box net homogeneity. Exactly like those at  NK Maribor, Brugge maintained their identity by draping the box nets over the stanchions.

UEFA Champions League - ŠK Slovan Bratislava

In an era when Central and Eastern European sides played between Continental D's, Slovan Bratislava borrowed from Feyenoord and installed cosmopolitan L-supports. 

Total Goalnets - Feyenoord Rotterdam

It's Total Hot Tub Time Machine at The Tub.

Feyenoord scored the goals which won the 1974 Eredivisie into A-frames.

 

Then celebrated that title win by going all Real Madrid.


Five years later skinny A-frames greeted the same PSV.



(And hosted Aston Villa v Bayern Munich two years after that)

 

Then just for something different, the stadium guys at de Kuip installed L-supports from the mid-80's onwards.

Total Goalnets - Eredivisie

Explaining the unique Dutch perspective that created total football, "Brilliant Orange"author David Winner writes that the Netherlands is the most densely populated country in Europe and that, "The Dutch think innovatively, creatively and  abstractly about space in their football because for centuries they had to think about space in every other area of their lives."

And in "The Ball is Round,"  David Goldblatt waxes long on the roots of total football, and finds them in total architecture - where Dan Roodenburgh, architect of Ajax' De Meer stadium proposed that the many separate elements in a building or project must be functionally and stylistically integrated into a whole vision - and the fine arts. Goldblatt argues eloquently that the "stripped down modern form (of Vermeer) can be seen in the abstract paintings of Mondrian who progressively reduced landscape and the natural world to the simplest elements of the visual arts - lines and blocks, horizontals and verticals, primary colours, black and white."

Both ideas can be seen to have come together in the Dutch on-field architecture of the 1970's, where simple, stripped down A-frames were designed to fit within the tight spaces of the cramped stadia that were such a feature of the Eredivisie at that time.

Total Goalnets - Eredivisie is a club-by-club review of Holland's history of goal nets of the era when the Dutch played the game in a way no-one had done before, and when Johan Cruyff was "Pythagoras in boots."

Ipswich Town

Though Ipswich would prove to be game to try any form of net supports in the 90's - hybrid Continental D's anybody? - simple, classic A-frame stanchions (similar to those at Leeds or Manchester United) served them through the glory years of the mid-70's...



to the UEFA Cup win in 1981.

Feyenoord #2

You can't post Feyenoord's goalnets without showing these curvy beauties from the 1970's.


The distortion of perspective in this clip, or one very similar, shown on On the Ball in the mid-70's convinced these writers (then 6 or 7) that 'Continental' goals were square, and not rectangular, like at home.

Might this explain our rusted-on belief that goalnets everywhere can be different?

Feyenoord

Two clips from Rotterdam in the 1980's illustrate perfectly what this blog's all about.

Chasing a Feyenoord thread through Youtube, we discovered the favoured on-field architecture of the early 90's were Latin American L-supports:


We followed the thread all the way back to a Holland v Belgium game in 1985. We didn't know where the game was played, and there's nothing about the venue in the description. But as soon as you see the goalnets, you know the game's being played in Rotterdam.