Athlone Town

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Athlone Town AFC
Club logo
Basic data
Surname Athlone Town Association
Football Club
Seat Athlone
founding 1887
president Tony Knight
Website athlonetownfc.ie
First soccer team
Head coach Brendan Place
Venue Athlone Town Stadium
Places 2500
league First League
2019 9th place
home
Away

The Athlone Town Association Football Club is an Irish football club based in Athlone . Founded in 1887, the club is the oldest football club in the Republic of Ireland and the club's colors are blue and black. The club was already a member of the League of Ireland for a few years in the 1920s, but has only been a member again since 1969, but since the mid-1990s only in the lower season, the First Division .

history

Athlone Town was founded in 1887, making it a few years older than the traditional Dublin clubs Bohemians , UCD and Shelbourne and even the oldest club in the League of Ireland . The Town played for the first time in the second season of the independent league of the Irish Free State in 1922; In 1924 they even managed to win the Cup of the Republic, which was only played for the third time, but the league never got beyond mediocrity and was finally excluded from the league as the last of the 1927/28 season.

It would be 40 years before the club was inducted back into the House of Lords of Irish football in 1969. The club held its own, and in 1975 The Town was runner-up by a long way behind the Bohemians. This was already a preview of the great times of the Athlone team in the early 1980s, when they won two championships and three league cup wins in four seasons. After that, however, the club went downhill. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s they played in the Premier and in the First Division , only to be second-rate since relegation in 1996. Even in the First Division, the club could not prevail recently, so that Athlone Town ended the 2005 season as the worst of all 22 Irish professional clubs in last place in the First Division.

On April 29, 2017, betting manipulation was revealed at the away game in Longford. The game ended 3-1 after Portuguese coach Ricardo Gravo called Romanian midfielder Dragos Sfrijan into defense and Latvian goalkeeper Igors Labuts blundered. The main owner of the association at that time was the company Pré Season, whose owners are not known. At the end of the season Athlone Town finished last in the table. In September 2017 the FAI suspended players Igors Labuts and Dragos Sfrijan for 12 months after UEFA found "clear and overwhelming evidence of betting". The Professional Footballers' Association of Ireland said the decision was based on "half-finished hints". The lock was therefore withdrawn for Labuts in October 2018.

Athlone Town has been represented in three seasons in European competitions. 1975/76 they reached the second round of the UEFA Cup , where they met AC Milan , with a home win and a draw at Vålerenga IF from Oslo . A very good team performance made it possible to keep a 0-0 draw in the first leg in Ireland, but then in Milan they had to admit defeat. In the other two participations (1981 and 1983), however, they failed in the first round of the European Cup without a win.

successes

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Athlone players suspended for match fixing to serve 12-month ban after appeal is thrown out . October 5, 2018. Retrieved June 7, 2020. 
  2. ↑ Athlone players banned for 12 months by FAI . In: RTÉ.ie , September 7, 2017. Accessed June 7, 2020. 
  3. ↑ Spiegel: "How Asian Competitors Manipulate Football in Europe" , accessed on June 7, 2020