Scottish Football Nicknames (Rankings 42-27)

This list will do what no other list has done before. Over the next three blogs we will rank each and every moniker in league football until we find a winner and the undisputed best football nickname in Scotland.

Of course, before we get to the winners we have to troll through the losers. 42nd in our list will have to live with the shame of having the worst nickname in Scottish football. Lets get to that now. 

Disclaimer: All nicknames were taken from the SPFL website. So any you feel we have gotten wrong please take it up with them.

Drum roll please… 

42. East Fife – The Fife

It’s nonsensical. The Fife? It doesn’t even make any sense. Outside of League One football it’s a sentence fragment. Aside from that glaring deficiency it is so unimaginative it sounds like someone was pressured into giving a nickname, on the spot, at gunpoint, and before they soiled themselves they blurted out the first thing that came to mind. There are also three other Scottish league clubs who play in Fife and all of them are enjoying greater success on the park right now than the club from Methil, so at present it is also soaked in unintentional irony.

41. Elgin City – The Black and Whites

This is, unquestionably, the most boring nickname in Scottish football. Club colour bynames are bad enough to begin with, e.g. The Sky Blues, The Reds etc. We get it, you play in those colours. Very original. ‘The Black and Whites’ is the worst offender on that tedious list. There is no atmosphere, no vibrancy. It conjured images of some dreadful team launching clearance after clearance out for a throw-in. 

40. Raith Rovers – The Rovers

Really? 130 years of history and this is the best they could come up with? You could understand if it was The Rovers and they were making a point about being the only team worth talking about with regards to the popular British moniker. Although, in order to truly claim that they would have had to have been the first club called Rovers and Blackburn precede them by eight years. Abbreviations are bad enough but I’m not even sure if this counts as one. 

39. Dundee – The Dark Blues

Personally, I think this is a little bit of a controversial entry because I was always under the impression the byname was ‘The Dee’s’, which isn’t much better but at least has greater individuality than ‘The Dark Blues’. Like with many other strip associated nicknames it is just too boring and this one in particular does not project success and prosperity. Dark blue is the colour of the Scottish night sky and we all know exactly how much of a dick that has been to us over the years. 

38. Kilmarnock – Killie

This is the first abbreviation on our list. As far as official nicknames go, choosing an abbreviation is just too lazy to be any good. Everybody uses the shortened ‘Killie’ regularly when talking about the club so there is that positive. However, it is too bland and offers no insight into the history or identity of the club or its fans. It is completely one dimensional. The town itself can be shortened in this way but it is only ever used regularly in a football sense. 

37. Livingston – The Livi Lions

It sounds like the nickname of the mascot (I think it actually might be) rather than the club itself. You can’t have the moniker of a professional football team associated with a children’s entertainer. It is like calling Rangers “The Broxi Bears”, Partick Thistle “The Jaggy McBees” or Hearts “The Scott Wilsons”. It makes the West Lothian team sound like an American sports institution and that is a problem when considering their history. Having been moved from Meadowbank and renamed in the mid-90s they are already viewed with disdain and labelled Franchise FC by opposing fans for partaking in an act acceptable in the States but considered sacrilege in Scotland. Lion does indicate a pretty ferocious opponent and they get points for at least trying for something different in the marketplace. 

36. Morton – The Ton

It is a little different from the rest in the abbreviated monikers category and it is certainly a better choice than ‘The Morts’ if they were hell-bent on going down that road. What makes it different almost renders it unusable. No media outlet outside of the club website regularly uses the name since it’s an awkward plural word to force into match reports and news stories. Furthermore, it’s small size edges it towards the mundane. 

“The blues are on the attack. The Reds will have to be careful not to concede.”

35. Stranraer – The Blues

Stranraer are called The Blues, them and about a thousand other clubs around the world. You know television adverts where the producers aren’t selling anything to do with football but for whatever reason have a couple of guys watching the sport as the setting? In those ads there is always a team called The Blues. It is so entirely inoffensive to anyone else that it is far past the point of boring. Now, in all fairness, they were founded in 1870, which predates any of the eight English clubs who’ve since adopted the collective term. Therefore, we have a proposition for Stranraer. Change the nickname to ‘The Original Blues’ and we’ll insert you somewhere in the top ten. 

34. St Johnstone – The Saints

This must have taken all of about 10 seconds to think up. St Johnstone’s byname ranks higher on our list than Kilmarnock’s because at least the name of the club has an interesting historical reference and isn’t just the town name itself. The ancient title for Perth was St John’s Toun and adapted by local cricketers, a couple of which broke away and started a football team. It’s a simple abbreviation, it isn’t stupid or anything and you can see why it was settled for, but it doesn’t deserve to be any higher. 

33. Hearts – Jam Tarts

It’s somewhat unfair to the Edinburgh club because Hearts in itself is a nickname, an abbreviation on Heart of Midlothian. Long time ago Hearts became the norm and therefore another was required to take its place. ‘The Maroons’ was a pre-television age favourite and certainly would have been a solid contender on this list since few football teams on earth play in maroon. Though for whatever reason that was phased out years ago and replaced with Jam Tarts, a rhyming slang nickname at its laziest. Who wants their football team to be associated with a small piece of pastry? In recent years the more butch sounding ‘Jambos’ has risen. Another terrible effort which sounds like it was invented by a drunken half-wit.

32. Hibernian – Hibees

‘Hibees’ sounds like a word invented by a child who is still struggling to form a coherent vocabulary. It’s a poorly coined phrased that isn’t threatening or worrisome to any opponent who comes across it. The alternative ‘The Cabbage’ is use of rhyming slang so disjointed that ‘Jam Tarts’ read like Wordsworth in comparison.

It does, however, have a key place in Hibs overall identity: Hibernian is the club, Hibs is the abbreviation, ‘Hibbies’ are the fans and ‘Hibees’ are the team. It all loops together nicely without needless use of extra lettering. It creates a sense of individualism that encompasses the whole club and gives them a in-world-of-their-own mindset – if you’ve ever spoken to any Hibs fan you’ll know exactly what I mean. 

31. Dundee United – The Terrors

The problem with this is that ‘The Terrors’ is one of three nicknames which are equally interspersed around the landscape. The other two are ‘The Arabs’ and ‘The Tangerines’. The latter is self explanatory; the former is a little trickier. It is thought to have been coined in the 1960s when the Tannadice pitch was stripped of all its grass following extreme snowy conditions and large amounts of sand was brought in to make it playable, a newspaper report then stated that the players “took to the sand like Arabs”. Apparently United use this nickname to refer to the fans and not the team, which is somewhat at odds with the origin of the story.

The Terrors is said to refer to the physical style of play that was once adopted by the club. In by-gone years the decision makers would have been oblivious to the fact that it is now ill-advised to name a team after a particular footballing style since it will likely change with the hiring of the next manager, thus leaving yourself open to ridicule from other clubs. There’s a modicum of inventiveness to it but rather than describing bulldozing footballers it sounds like a wayward group of toddlers. 

Oh look, its The Terrors.

30. Stirling Albion – The Binos

This is a
contraction rather than an abbreviated spit-out from Albion.
It gives Stirling a unique nickname in league football. No easy feat when there are
42 Scottish clubs, 72 English and four of those teams have the word ‘Albion’ in their name. Credit is also deserved for
refusing to plainly refer to the club as ‘Albion’
which is more common in English football. Unfortunately there is no historical
or local tie-in otherwise it would have ranked further up the list.

29. Stenhousemuir
– The Warriors

Any
documentation of the reasoning has been lost and the story failed to be passed
down the generations. Stenhousemuir are ‘The Warriors’ and nobody seems to know
why. A warrior is at least an opponent you would not want to face, either in a
football match or in an early 80s bout of football hooliganism, so it does have a certain presence about it. But I still don’t like it. It
sounds like a name that belongs to a rugby club or an American sports franchise
and doesn’t fit the humble surroundings of Ochilview Park.
If they do ever uncover an interesting back story then it can go higher up the
list, but at present it is too little referred to (most people opt for
‘Stenny’) to make it out of the bottom 16.

28. Albion Rovers – The Wee Rovers

Raith fans
will be displeased that this entry ranks higher than theirs. I can certainly
understand the frustration. It is one team admitting they are inferior
to another. Well, this isn’t American sports. Vanquishing beasts does not have to
resonate in the mind of an opponent. Our nicknames are of a humbler nature.
Albion Rovers at least are demonstrating the sort of grounded humility that has
long become the charm of perennial League Two clubs with a little, or wee, bit
of Scottish thrown in.

27. Rangers –
The Gers

Our logic
should be clear by now: we don’t like simple abbreviations. This is, however, one
of the better simple abbreviations, and that has everything to do with its
place in Scottish expressionism. Fans of smaller clubs can feel free to cry foul now
because their casual appellations are not repeated in quite the same volume and
therefore cannot enter the consciousness to quite an extent. Regardless, ‘Gers’
is uttered so often that it has its own place. It can be elongated or
particular emphasis place on certain letters that reflects the mood of the man
saying it, both of which are impressive characteristics for a four letter word.
Still, it’s a little too short, which prompted the support to build a nickname
around the nickname with ‘The Teddy Bears’.

Feel free to leave any notes in the comments or tell us what you think of the list so far on twitter. 

If you’ve enjoyed the blogs make sure to check out the podcast. The latest show was entitled Where Football Goes To Die.