Azerbaijani Premier League Preview: FK Olimpik Baku

Olimpik Baku… Bad Spellers

As players around the globe are put through the paces in hopes of shaking off the rust ahead of their respective seasons, we here at UF fancy some pre-season training of our own… for the brain! In order to prepare properly for the next ten glorious months of hot club-on-club action, we’re previewing various leagues from around the globe.

First up, the Premier League. No, not THAT one. No, not that one either. Or that one. Nope, try again. Alright, I’ll just tell you — introducing the 14-team Azerbaijani Premier League (known as the Top League until 2007) !

Let’s get our learn on.

There are nine pieces of information that are essential to understanding Olimpik Baku.

1. The team gets psyched up for matches by listening to the odd number tracks of Billy Squier’s “In the Dark.” One notable exception is midfielder Dragan Mandic who refuses to participate on the grounds that “Lonely Is the Night”—what he feels to be the album’s best song—is an even-numbered track.

2. Buried under the stadium grounds at Shafa Stadion is a bag of plastic Smurf figurines that Azerbaijani legend prophesies will animate two days before the apocalypse comes.

3. Forward Nikolajs Kozacuks has a labradoodle that is allowed to run free around the team’s training grounds. Every time last season that Pepi—that’s the dog’s name—caught and killed a squirrel on a Thursday, the team won the subsequent weekend’s game by no less than two goals.

4. Manager Asker Abdullayev sets his line-up by reading the astrological charts of Raymond Domenech’s last squad call-ups.

5. It is customary for one Olimpik Baku player to place a single violet on the floor of the dressing room before each away match. It is also customary for the team psysio to urinate on the flower when the team is in the tunnel. The team is completely unaware of this second custom.

6. Olimpik Baku defender Dianu was born a hermaphrodite in his native Brazil. His uncle was a deckhand on the Edmund Fitzgerald and before moving to Azerbaijan Dianu carried out an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Gordon Lighfoot.

7. Godzilla is an Olimpik Baku fan.

8. In 1996, Olimpik Baku was started as a futsal club under the name Shuvalan. One game day, too many people showed up to play, so they converted to a regular association football squad on the spot and immediately joined the Azerbaijani Premier League.

9. The teams colors are blue and white because blue is culturally symbolic of the Hegelian dialectic in Azerbaijan. The club is continuallly involved an existential struggle to negate itself during matches. Victory for Olimpik Baku is achieved not by scoring more goals than their opposition but by expressing an antithesis to their thesis, thereby becoming a synthesis. This explains why the club has never won the league.