Flippin’ The Bird – Club Nicknames and Bird Symbolism

What’s in a name? Well plenty to be honest. The name of a football club, the colors and emblem they use, the nicknames they’re given – all of these can explain a great detail about how the club is seen by its fans (and rivals) and can give insight into local history and culture. While some are rather straightforward, others are absurdly convoluted, others just absurd. It’s hard to know where to begin with such a theme so I’ve picked on one completely at random – clubs with bird nicknames. But these are no ordinary bird nicknames…

The Spanish football club Espanyol, based in the Catalan capital of Barcelona, are known by friend and foe as Los Periquitos – the Little Parakeets. The logical conclusion would be that their outfits look like parakeets. But what would be the point of this article if we were going with simple and logical explanations?

In the 1920s a cartoonist named Valentí Castanys was quite popular in Barcelona and contributed to a number of publications including helping to launch the football magazine Xut!. Whenever he presented Espanyol in his cartoons they would be drawn as four cats (quatre gats in the local lingo). There is a saying in Spain that when hardly anyone is around “there are four cats”. I don’t pretend to know what that is supposed to mean but nonetheless that is the expression and that is how he ironically portrayed Espanyol’s lack of fan support.

Meanwhile the classic cartoon film Felix the Cat made its way to Spain in the latter part of the 1920s. While immensely popular as a silent film its transition to the world of spoken film was very awkward, and Felix ended up sounding more bird than cat. In Spain he came to be called the gat perico – the parakeet cat.

It didn’t take long for the wonderful process of language to throw these names in a blender and the quatre gats became the quatre gats pericos and then just pericos and then the name recognized as uniquely Espanyol today – Los Periquitos.

From Spain we travel to Brazil and to another bizarre bird nickname – Urubu. The Vulture. During a vital match in the 1960s a fan of the Rio club Flamengo smuggled a live vulture into an important match and released it out onto the field just before kickoff.

Let’s think about that for a minute. Do you have any idea how large a vulture is? They are enormous freaking birds. They can weigh 5-10 pounds, can be 2-3 feet tall and have a wingspan of up to five feet. I can’t even fathom how you could sneak such a thing into a stadium. I guess it was a different era. These days you can’t even sneak a bag of peanuts into the stadium if they’re not the official club peanuts purchased at the official club store using the official club credit card.

I half wonder if the story has simply grown into legend over the years. Could it have been a pigeon someone brought in? After being stuffed in someone’s overcoat for about an hour it was probably barely alive. Made it about a quarter of the way to the center circle before taking a breather. But a good story is a good story. So let’s continue.

The fan smuggled the bird in and released it. I’m pretty sure you can imagine the psychological effect on a keyed-up goalkeeper seeing a vulture fly past his goalpost. Flamengo wins. The event is immortalised in a newspaper cartoon soon after. A legend is born.

The final stop on our great bird nicknames world tour is the Dikefalos.

The word Dikefalos (ΔΙΚΕΦΑΛΟΣ in Greek) means The Double-Headed Eagle. This is a nickname used by a number of Greek clubs, the most prominent of those being AEK Athens. The eagle with two heads is a symbol of the Byzantine Empire, of the Holy Roman Empire and of Constantinople. It is meant to display the prominence of the Emperor whose eyes looked to both East and West. It is also the symbol of the Orthodox Church. That’s a whole lot of symbolism for one bird.

The club ΑΘΛΗΤΙΚΗ ΕΝΩΣΙΣ ΚΩΝΣΤΑΝΤΙΝΟΥΠΟΛΕΩΣ (Athletic Union of Constantinople or AEK to the rest of you) were founded by Greek refugees who fled Constantinople after the Greek-Turkish Wars of the early 20th century. The club’s name, emblem, nickname even colors (the black and gold of the Orthodox Church formerly based in Constantinople) are all evocative reminders of a dark and painful chapter in Greek history.

A number of other Greek clubs use the double-headed eagle symbol and in fact it can be found in many parts of the East European world due to their shared Orthodox history. It can even be found on the emblem of AFC Wimbledon, the fan-run club created after the old Wimbledon moved to Milton Keynes. And no, I don’t have the foggiest idea why.

Jeremy Rueter publishes the website albionroad.com, an encyclopedia of football with profiles of 500+ clubs, leagues and countries.

AEK Athens, Espanyol, Flamengo, Politics and Society