Fandom Rivalry / Sports

Jay Briscoe: It's crazy when you think about it man. MMA done took over the world. MMA's the biggest shit going right now.

Mark Briscoe: Taking airtime away from my boxing, man.

— Ring of Honor

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• Over in Europe it's mostly the football rivalries that get the biggest press. Listing them all would take forever, but each country has a few prominent teams, and liking one automatically means you have to passionately hate whoever is playing them.
  • If there's a Ur-Example, it must be Celtic-Rangers, the Old Firm. This has been going on for all of 121 years, with the two clubs becoming symbols of the deep social and religious divides in Scotland. Also in the UK, there are several London derbies such as Arsenal-Tottenham, West Ham-Millwall, and Fulham-Chelsea; plus there's Newcastle-Sunderland, Man Utd-Man City, Derby-Leicester-Nottingham Forest, and Villa-Birmingham-West Brom-Wolves. Historically, the most potent English rivalry by far is Manchester United vs Liverpool. The two biggest and most successful English clubs, from rival cities only 26 miles apart, yet bear similarities in the start of their success, dominating periods and even shirt colour - it actually predates the teams, going back to the competition between the cities during the Industrial Revolution.
    • Celtic-Rangers are also widely supported in Stroke Country, as a further sign of the divisions around here.
    • Celtic was never (officially) the "Catholic team" but was always about Irish heritage. Rangers was officially sectarian until the 1980s when they signed Mo Johnston.... and a bunch of lifelong Rangers fans burnt their season tickets in protest against this unthinkable abomination.
    • Everybody versus Manchester United. The team have been extremely successful since the 1980s at least, leading to practically every other team seeing them as the one to beat, and to a stereotype of their fans as "glory hunters" who have no regional connection to them and only like them because they win all the time. Their local supporters were also notorious for putting the club way ahead of the English national team. There is even a common term for this. ABU seen on a football forum means "Anyone But United".
    • In the 2000s, people from all over the country also began to hate Chelsea and Manchester City, because they're seen as only being successful because their fantastically wealthy foreign owners can buy any player they fancy.
    • In the late 2010s, this produced the Liverpool-Manchester City rivalry, as the two were now the dominant footballing superpowers in England, between them racking up the four highest points totals in the entire 130 plus year history of England's top division in the space of three seasons. Manchester City tended to outplay everyone, but took 13 years after their 2008 takeover to win a match at Anfield, Liverpool's home stadium, and got humiliated on more than one occasion in the Champions League (the one competition that they have - as of 2021 - been unable to succeed in, whereas Liverpool have won it 6 times).
    • It should also be mentioned that in Manchester itself, the City-United rivalry is taken to almost religious levels. You will support one of the teams, and it will be the one your father and his father before him supported, and God help you if you are ever seen associating with someone from the other side.
    • Similarly, the Liverpool-Everton rivalry is just as passionate, and on the pitch, officially the most vicious in the League, having racked up the most red cards of any fixture. However, peculiarly, off the pitch it's relatively friendly - not quite to the levels of early 80's, when it was known as 'the Friendly Derby' - but still sufficiently friendly that it's the only derby that doesn't enforce fan segregation. This has something to do with the fact that it's less tribal than in Manchester, with fans of both sides often being from the same families (and sometimes, even players come from families that traditionally supported the other side), and pulling together in times of need. In other words, it's more like a family feud.
  • In Wales, Cardiff City vs. Swansea City is a rather nasty rivalry with the two regularly in the same division and therefore playing each other twice a season. It was so nasty that, for a while, away fans were banned from going to the game - and, when it was lifted, away fans had to be escorted to and from the other stadium by the police (anybody who refused to be escorted would not be allowed in the stadium).
    • Except now, as Swansea has claim to being the first Welsh team to play in the English Premier League, whereas Cardiff lost its playoff semi-final to Reading (who lost to Swansea). This will probably only help to add fuel to the fire - as would Cardiff being promoted to the Premier League the same season Swansea were relegated from it.
  • Argentina's soccer rivalries. Name any of them. It is a very bloody rivalry and a very strong on at that, the most important of these, of course, is Boca Juniors — River Plate, aka the Superclasico, but there's also Independiente — Racing de Avellaneda, San Lorenzo — Huracán, (or Vélez Sarsfield in some cases) Newell's Old Boys — Rosario Central, (Rosario) Belgrano — Talleres, (Cordoba) Gimnasia — Estudiantes (La Plata)... Some rivalries have very dark stories, which often involve fan deaths at battles, a fact which induced to some laws to prevent visitor spectators in lower division matches.
    • Brazil is just as bad with this. In a few cases, a team has many regional rivals (both Rio and São Paulo have 4 big teams - Corinthians, Palmeiras, São Paulo and Santos for São Paulo; and Botafogo, Fluminense, Flamengo and Vasco da Gama for Rio). Some supporters create entire websites on dissing the rival. And like in Argentina, the "classic matches" always have fights, sometimes with people dying.
    • In national teams, Argentina — Brazil and Argentina — Uruguay can count in South America, although the latter is considered a friendly rivalry. Overseas, the rivalry is with England, one that is very much mutual. Hoo boy...
    • If you thought that being a Chilean soccer fan would be less, uhm, complicated... you are wrong. Never ever put fans of either Colo Colo, Universidad Catolica and/or Universidad de Chile in the same room. In few minutes or even seconds, someone's gonna get at least yelled at. And few later, someone will get beaten up. And in regards, to "classic matches", specially Colo Colo vs. U. de Chile... yeah, people have died too.
  • Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. This one is frickin' global: scuffles over the game have been reported as far afield as Cape Town and Ramallah. It stems from regional rivalries dating back centuries, as well as the cities being respective bastions of the right and left during the Spanish Civil War.
  • The Madrid derby (Real Madrid and Atlético Madrid). Their supporters see each other as sworn enemies, and for good reason. Not helped by the fact they had some quite contentious match-ups in both La Liga and the Champions League in the 2010s.
  • In Egypt, the rivalry is between Al-Ahly vs. Zamalek. This one had class connotations—Al-Ahly (literally, "the National" Club) was founded by Egyptians, for Egyptians, while Zamalek was founded by a group of expatriates and some wealthier locals (the eponymous Nile island of Zamalek being one of Cairo's posher neighborhoods). However, this element has subsided over time. Nevertheless, games between the two — called the "Cairo Derby" as both teams are based in the capital — can lead to some serious rioting/crazy street-celebration, particularly since the Ultras Ahlawy (Arabic for "Ultras of al-Ahly") group got started in 2007; their antics forced the CAF to have the game against Wydad Casablanca in the 2011 African Champions League to be played in an empty stadium. Later, a 2012 stadium riot involving Ahlawys led to the adoption of empty stadiums for all Egyptian Premier League matches until 2018.
    • Their recent antics also have political connotations: the Ahlawy Ultras were deeply involved in the Revolution of 2011, serving as the "muscle" for the revolutionaries, protecting them against the police. In this case, even Zamalkawis (that is, Zamalek supporters) loved the Ahlaiwis (because they were basically the people's army).
  • England versus Germany in international football, although somewhat one sided. Made worse by Germany's habit of knocking England out of tournaments in penalty shootouts. Italy, being Germany's bogey team in international matches, sometimes joins the scuffles as well. In the end the German main rivalry are the Netherlands though, with even the most lefty internationalist singer/songwriters taking off time of their regular schedule of fighting for the suppressed to state how much they hate the Netherlands in football.
  • Refreshingly averted between Italy and Spain; despite frequent international bouts between the Azzurri and the Furia Roja, there is no animosity between the two sides. Motorcycle racing, on the other hand, hoo boy: don't mention the 2015 Malaysian Grand Prix if you know what's good for you.
  • In Italy itself, the big rivalries are usually locked within city or regional limits: AC Milan vs FC Internazionale,^note Which historically had class associations (Inter was middle-class and Milan was working-class), though this is mostly gone now. More recently it had political implications; it was bought in 1986 by one Silvio Berlusconi, a Milan-based entrepreneur who later became a highly controversial right-populist Prime Minister of Italy. During the period he dominated first the Italian Right and then Italian politics in general (from the mid-1990s to his ignominious fall in the early 2010s), support for AC Milan was associated with support for Berlusconi. Now that Berlusconi has been forced to let go of his club ownership (part of the aforesaid ignominious fall), these associations are also gone. AS Roma vs SS Lazio,^note Which has some political connotations, in that a small but significant minority of Lazio supporters are notorious right-wingers (neofascists even) and racists, while the Roma fanbase doesn't really have that going. So in media, "Lazio supporter" can be (though isn't necessarily) code for "Nazi". Genoa vs Sampdoria, Chievoverona vs Hellas Verona, Napoli vs Avellino vs Salernitana^note Though it has dramatically whittled down in intensity in the last few years due to Napoli fighting for the national title in multiple occasions and Avellino and Salernitana languishing in the lower tiers, Palermo vs Catania, and Juventus vs Torino are the most important of the lot, although in recent years there have also been major trans-regional scuffles such as Juventus vs Napoli, Hellas Verona vs Napoli, and Juventus vs pretty much everyone else - due to their dominance in recent years, leading to a similar case as detailed above with Manchester United, not helped by the Calciopoli scandal which saw Juventus stripped of their 2004-05 title. Recently, a rivalry has also sparked between Frosinone and Palermo, after a rather controversial Serie B play-off final.
  • Germany has also its fair share of rivalries, but the most prominent of them all by far is Borussia Dortmund vs Schalke 04, a rivalry known as the Revierderby. Other important rivalries include Bayern-1860 in Munich, Borussia Monchengladbach-1. FC Koln-Bayer Leverkusen-Fortuna Dusseldorf, 1. FC Kaiserslautern-Bayern Munich, Eintracht Frankfurt-Kickers Offenbach, Hamburg SV-FC St. Pauli-Werder Bremen, 1. FC Nurnberg-Greuther Furth, and Lokomotive-Chemie in Leipzig. Everyone will gladly settle their differences to gang up on RB Leipzig, though.
  • In Sweden, the big rivalries have always been intra-city affairs, with Djurgårdens IF - AIK in Stockholm and GAIS - IFK Göteborg in Gothenburg being the most prominent. In both cases, there is a certain amount of classism added to the mix, as AIK and GAIS are based in traditionally working-class areas and have a fanbase which has been mostly working-class, whereas IFK Göteborg and Djurgårdens IF have had upper-class connotations and fans. The distinction is mostly gone these days, but some of it still lingers.
  • For player-related ones, the biggest is Cristiano Ronaldo vs. Lionel Messi, which adequately for a long time also crossed with Real\Barça.
  • In Mexico, Club America is marked as the team with most rivalries in the country to the point that one of the mottos of the team is "Odiame Más" (lit. "Hate Me More"), while there are another rivalries marked more by the region.
    • In Mexico City, Club America shares the city with rival clubs Cruz Azul and Pumas, the first one called "El Clásico Joven" (lit. "The Young Derby", due to Cruz Azul being founded several years later than America), has even has important final games between the two teams. But the most hardest one is against Pumas UNAM where, regularly, the barras of both teams tend to throw stones to the buses when the teams arrive to the rival stadium, also they have one of the most violent final games when some fans were suffocated to death in the Estadio Olimpico Mexico 68 in 1985.
    • However, America´s biggest rivalry is against Club Deportivo Guadalajara, because of the team localization outside of Mexico City, their preference to only include Mexican born players and the fact that, for a long time, the "Chivas" were capable to win national tournaments with very few money (the low class people team) compared to the big money Televisa provides to Club America (the high class people team). There was even a 60s movies, Tirando a Gol, where it shows that the fans were not able to talk to each other, as long as their sons play for the respective teams. In real life, is very normal to see families divided when the Clasico de Clasicos (The Derby of all Derbies) is on television.
    • Club Deportivo Guadalajara shares a rivalry with fellow Guadalajara team, Atlas F.C., called "El Clásico Tapatío" (lit. "The Tapatio Derby"), that normally pokes fun on their rivals because the Chivas had won 12 National Championships against 3 of the Rojinegros, two of them in recent years after a 60 year drought that have them as the "Lovable Losers" of the city.
    • El Clásico Regiomontano (lit. "The Monterrey Derby") is the most intense city rivalry in Mexico, this rivalry is between Monterrey and Tigres, the football clubs of the city of Monterrey, to the point that local press number the games as if is the Super Bowl and even there are shows dedicated to the specific teams and even the sport commentators were accused to ask fans to attack the other team fans.
• Figure skaters versus hockey players. 'Tis totally true, tropers.
• College-frickin'-football (American) and basketball, especially in the Midwest and South.
  • Red River Rivalry^note Which is itself already toned-down, as the game used to be known as the Red River Shootout. Anyone from Texas or Oklahoma will know exactly what I am talking about before they even click the link.
  • The Lone Star Showdown between University of Texas and Texas A&M University. Relatively civil over the past couple of decades, which leads some fans from each side to campaign to "bring back the hate".
    • The Lone Star Showdown is also on hold indefinitely due to Texas A&M leaving the Big 12 Conference to join the SEC. Both fanbases would like to bring the annual game back, but there were no concrete plans to do so... until UT announced in 2021 that it would join A&M in the SEC no later than 2025 (and possibly even earlier than that).
    • Or you could always support Texas Tech and the Red Raiders, although Tech vs. UT is the main rivalry for Red Raider fans.
    • One other possibility is a new rivalry between Texas and TCU (Texas Christian University), which has replaced the Lone Star Showdown in Texas's Thanksgiving game day slot. However, with Texas going to the SEC (as mentioned above) it is unknown how often they will face each other afterward.
  • The classic: The University of Michigan and The Ohio State University, quite possibly the oldest rivalry among BCS teams (the Ivy League's rivalries are older, but they're not in contention anymore). Not half as interesting as it used to be, since U-M has been emphasizing academics so heavily, but wearing red and gray in Ann Arbor will get you catcalls in the daytime and could get you into a scrape during the drunken nights. On the other hand, wearing maize and blue in Columbus is a capital offense.
    • Note that wearing red and gray in Ann Arbor would be a capital offense, but for the fact that Michigan abolished the death penalty in 1846.^note For most crimes; treason — and you might argue that wearing OSU colors in Ann Arbor is similar to treason, seeing as it gives aid and comfort to the enemy — was technically a capital offense before the Constitution of 1963 placed a complete ban.
    • True story: one of the biggest dancesport events in the US is Ohio Star Ball, held in Columbus every November. It includes collegiate team competition. It almost always overlaps the UM/OSU game. Members of the Michigan ballroom team have gotten catcalled and threatened for wearing their team jackets, even in the convention center where the competition takes place!
  • Michigan/Michigan State isn't as big a rivalry as Michigan/Ohio State, but you'd never know that as a kid growing up in the Detroit area. It's been known to split families in two on the day of the game. It's even gotten to the point where guards are posted around Sparty (a bronze Art Deco statue of a Spartan warrior that serves as the basis for Michigan State's mascot) whenever Michigan comes to play, since Michigan fans will sometimes paint a little golden M (the Michigan logo) on his bottom. Michigan returns the favor when State plays the Big House by posting guards around the "M" inlaid into the Diag^note The Diag being the large open space on the Central Campus, criss-crossed by diagonal walkways between class buildings, which forms the heart of academic life at Michigan. (which visiting Spartans had been known to vandalize, especially in the 1970s-80s). Also, Ann Arbor (where Michigan is located) has blue and gold street signs (everywhere else in the area has green and white street signs, but green and white are Michigan State's official colors while Michigan's are maize and blue).
  • While we're on the topic of Midwest rivalries, Wisconsin-Minnesota is pretty storied. And oh yeah, Iowa-Wisconsin has been ridiculously close over the last few years. This is the link for the football (the American kind, for you Europeans) rivalry. Wisconsin leads the gridiron series 43-42-2. But it doesn't end there. It extends to basketball too. Including their most recent game, (a 79-74 Wisconsin victory) the last five match ups have been decided by 5 or less points. Whoo, that's close.
  • But none of these can compare to the Iron Bowl, the rivalry between the Alabama Crimson Tide and the Auburn Tigers. Fans of the winning team have been known to burn the score of the game into the lawns of neighbors who support the losing team to rub it in. Or worse. An Alabama fan was arrested for poisoning some trees on the Auburn campus.
    • The 2013 season was even worse. One Alabama fan murdered another because apparently she wasn't upset enough that Alabama had lost.
    • Also worth noting is the slogan of the Third Saturday in October (the Alabama-Tennessee rivalry), "Hate Auburn because you have to, hate Tennessee because you want to."
  • Brigham Young University vs the University of Utah. Take all the usual college rivalry elements as noted above, then add some religion to the mix. BYU is owned by the LDS (Mormon) Church; the U is run by the state of Utah. Many BYU fans consider the U to be a secular, sin-ridden, anti-religious school. Many U fans consider BYU to be an academically inferior, self-righteous indoctrination camp. Neither side quite knows what to make of the fact that Brigham Young founded both schools, or that the current president of the LDS Church and his two immediate predecessors all graduated from the U.
  • In terms of longevity at least, the rivalry between Patriot League enemies Lafayette and Lehigh, both located in the Lehigh Valley of eastern Pennsylvania, top all others. They've been going at it every year since 1897,^*If you want to nitpick, they didn't play in 2020 thanks to COVID-19, but the Patriot League moved its 2020 football season to spring 2021 and the schools did play that April. making their big game the oldest uninterrupted college football rivalry in the United States.
  • UCLA vs USC. They absolutely HATE each other. ESPN demonstratesThe crosstown rivalry splits families at times. It doesn't help that it's in Los Angeles, the second most populated city in the United States.
  • BCS. Never before have three letters brought such rage in collegiate sports. And that's just if you support a college from an automatic-qualifying (in today's era, Power Five) conference. Supporting a non-AQ (now Group of Five) college means those letters mean something else entirely... The BCS was scrapped after the 2013 season and replaced with the College Football Playoff; the rage that the letters inspired has now been transferred to the letters CFP.
  • Florida-Florida State. In fact, all college football teams in Florida other than the Gators tend to dislike the Gators, as they have a rivalry with the Hurricanes and the Seminoles.
  • The North Carolina-Duke rivalry is so strong that when somebody wrote a book about it, it was titled To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever. A lot of fans on both sides took one look at that title and went, "Yep."
  • The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill versus North Carolina State University rivalry can get pretty intense, too. On a side note, there is some weirdly enthusiastic rivalry between UNC-A and UNC-CH...
  • There are generally two categories of college football fans from South Carolina: those who pull for the University of South Carolina Gamecocks, and those who pull for the Clemson University Tigers. Each side refers to their rivals as "the Kitties" and "the Lamecocks" respectively.
  • Alabama State and A&M for the SWAC (the bands too).
  • Arizona and Arizona State may not have the national recognition that some of the others listed here do, but is notable for being played for the (NCAA-certified) oldest rivalry trophy ever, the Territorial Cup, which has been awarded since 1889.
  • Almost every SEC team has one big, hate-filled rivalry. Most schools have one line in either an official or unofficial song that gives another team the finger.
    • Alabama — "F*** Auburn" in "Dixieland Delight", the song played in the middle of the second half.
    • The fight song also alludes to the now-dead rivalries with Georgia and Georgia Tech.
    • "And LSU" / "And Tennessee Too!" right afterwards.
    • Ole Miss — When "And the South shall rise again!" was banned, fans took replaced it with the old saying "And geaux to hell, LSU!"
    • Likewise, LSU has "Geaux to hell, Ole Miss!"
    • While it's not in their fight song, Mississippi State fans will shout "Go to hell, Ole Miss!" at the start of every single football game.
  • Army-Navy (and to a lesser extent the heated games vs. Air Force Academy). For a brief period — the 1940s and 1950s — this was one of the premier football rivalries, supported by an existing Interservice Rivalry centuries in the making. While both schools have fallen from top-tier status, their season-ending contest (nowadays scheduled as the last regular season game before the bowls kick in) remains well-watched, the rivalry more respected than hated.
  • University of Georgia vs. Georgia Tech. Their fight songs even reference each other — Georgia's ends with "And to hell with Georgia Tech", while Tech's includes "To hell with Georgia."
  • University of Oregon Ducks vs. Oregon State Beavers. With the Ducks becoming a dominant force in college football since the start of The New '10s, this has died out somewhat, but it still exists, having gone on for over a century in the state of Oregon. The game between the Ducks and the Beavers is known as "the Civil War", as it's been known to divide otherwise peaceful neighborhoods in Oregon down a very thin line.
  • Also from the northwest, the University of Washington Huskies on the western side of the Cascade Range, and the Washington State University Cougars on the eastern side.
  • Virginia–Virginia Tech. Depending on who you ask, Hokie fans are inbred and uncultured hillbillies with an IQ so low they think animal husbandry is a legitimate academic discipline, and who think the only sport VT sponsors is football. By contrast, Cavaliers are wannabe upper-class twits with delusions of grandeur, an unhealthy obsession with basketball now that their team's finally good again, and UVA has a joke of an engineering school. Regardless, the rivalry's more than a little one-sided in football; the only game that UVA has won since 2003 was the 2019 edition, and the Cavs haven't beaten Tech in consecutive games in the current century. In 2015, they both hired coaches whose teams, the year before, had gotten into a post-bowl game brawl.
• Most Baltimore Ravens fans had no doubt who they were rooting for in Super Bowl XLIV — Colts hate has run deep ever since the former Baltimore Colts infamously packed up at midnight to rush them over to their new home in Indianapolis. There's also a less entrenched Ravens/Titans rivalry.
  • Ravens/Steelers can get nasty quickly. This is due to the fact that this feud is the Spiritual Successor to the original Cleveland Browns/Steelers rivalry (Art Modell was the owner of both the Browns and Ravens, and he moved his team and the staff to Baltimore in 1996. However, the city of Cleveland retained the Browns' history, records, championships, team colors, etc.).
  • Back in the AFC Central days. There was a huge division rivalry between the Jacksonville Jaguars and Pittsburgh Steelers. You can thank the Houston Texans for causing a division realignment that ruined the rivalry.^note Really you could thank the Browns moving to Baltimore and Cleveland getting a new Browns franchise... which left the NFL with 31 teams and meant that one team would have to be on a BYE week every week. Houston was awarded the 32nd NFL team mostly to fix this problem, and because they got screwed over when the Houston Oilers moved to Tennessee to become the Titans.
  • The Jaguars also have a huge rivalry with the Tennessee Titans, this is mostly due to the 1999 season, when the Jaguars went 14-2, with both losses being to the Titans, who beat them again at the AFC Championship Game.
  • Speaking of the Titans, they too had a nasty division rivalry with the Steelers that dates back to their days in Houston. Ask many Jaguars and Titans fans and will more often they reminisce about their old AFC Central bloodbaths with the Steelers and Ravens.
  • The Houston Texans vs. Tennessee Titans (a.k.a. the former Houston Oilers). The name Bud Adams will garner nothing but absolute contempt in Houston, TX.
  • Before the Raiders skedaddled to Vegas, a visit to the Oakland Coliseum as a supporter of the Chiefs, Broncos or Chargers was just short of life-threatening. There WILL be blood. Raider Nation is vicious to AFC West fans, and many a fight breaks out just because of a guy having too much to drink taking offense at someone not clad in silver and black. If you do manage to avoid a fight, be prepared to sit through a long day of getting heckled and jeered at. Until the Raiders lose, anyway.
    • Raiders vs. Steelers can get pretty nasty, too, mostly because of the Immaculate Reception, and John Madden's claim that that play should've been ruled an incomplete pass. A lot less so since the Raiders entered their current Audience-Alienating Era, which roughly coincided with the Steelers putting their own 80's-90's Dork Age behind them.
  • The whole NFC East (Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles, and Washington Commanders) despises each other, to the point where it's hard to pick the biggest rivalry, but it's probably Dallas and Washington. The intra-divisional rivalry is so bitter that many fans of a particular team count an otherwise dismal season a success if their favorites beat their most hated rival in both outings. It's even so bitter than when Deion Sanders, then with the Cowboys, played a minor league baseball game against Richmond (which is in Washington territory) he was booed down by the spectators every time he went to bat.^note Sanders being arrested for assaulting two fans in another game against Richmond a decade earlier probably contributed to their sentiment.
    • Dallas-Washington may be the big one (certainly the oldest, dating back to before the Cowboys existed), but a lot more emphasis has been placed on the games against the Eagles (who won Super Bowl LII). It's also worth noting that wearing an enemy team's jersey in the City of Brotherly Love is likely to get you stabbed. Or shot.
  • The NFC North (Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions, Green Bay Packers, and Minnesota Vikings) also despises each other, although it isn't quite as much of a den of venomous hatred as the NFC East. The Packers being the most consistently dominant team (the Bears and Vikings being highly variable and the Lions being...um...the Lions), the antipathy between the Pack and everyone else is probably the strongest, followed by the sniping between the Bears and Lions (which is more a part of the rivalry between the two cities in everything^note East Coast Americans: Detroit is the Philadelphia to Chicago's New York. Get it now?). That said, this is the Midwest; the rivalries don't have much of a track record of violence.
  • Before the Raiders' most recent move, the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland Raiders, due to being very geographically close — both representative cities are separated only by a bay and a bridge. Each team's fandom has a derogatory nickname for the other team — "Forty Whiners" or simply "Whiners" for the 49ers, and "Haters" for the Raiders. Once again, the "Raider Nation" mentality comes into play. Games played between the two teams were referred to by some as the "Battle of the Bay Area". Whether this rivalry remains as a result of the Raiders' move to Las Vegas has yet to be determined.
  • The Kansas City Chiefs and Seattle Seahawks have a bizarre one. Instead of competing on the field, they compete over who has the loudest fans. The holder of the world record for crowd noise constantly switches back and forth between the two (the current holder is the Chiefs).
  • The NFC South (Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers, New Orleans Saints, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers) is rife with animosity, particularly between the Falcons and Saints, the two oldest teams in the division, who will take every opportunity to snipe at one another.
  • The New Orleans Saints and Minnesota Vikings have an extremely intense rivalry. The roots of this date back to the 1987-88 playoffs, when the Saints made the postseason for the very first time in existence, only to get soundly beaten by the Vikings, but it truly took off after the 2009-10 playoffs, when the Vikings suffered a heartbreaking loss to the Saints at the NFC Championship Game, who went on to win Super Bowl XLIV, which was further intensified by the "Bountygate" scandal in 2012, which revealed that from the 2009-10 through 2011-12 seasons, the Saints operated a bounty program, offering bonuses to players who intentionally injured players from opposing teams. Saints fans, feeling the allegations were trumped up, see the Vikings as sore losers, while Vikings fans see the Saints as illegitimate champions. In the 2017-18 playoffs, it was the Vikings who saw a miraculous last-second win against the Saints, which some Vikings fans feel helped even the score after the 2009-10 NFC championship, before defeating them again in the 2019-20 playoffs.
• Another is the New York Yankees vs. the Boston Red Sox. The history is rife with player drama (of which the sale of Babe Ruth from Boston to New York is simply the most famous), the "David vs. Goliath" overtones, and divides within single states like Connecticut.
  • While we're at it, Boston seems to be the center for a lot of American pro sports' biggest rivalries. In addition to Sox-Yankees, there's Celtics-Lakers, Patriots-Colts (often boiled down to Brady-Manning) and the extremely bitter Bruins-Canadiens.
    • Bruins-Canadiens deserves special mention. For the most part, Red Sox/Celtics/Patriots players don't take their respective rivalries nearly as seriously as the fans. With the Bruins and Canadiens, there will be fighting majors. Lots of them. And blood.
    • As for the fans, it can get pretty shocking. "Tabarnak de Bruins" might as well be Montreal's second motto, and saying it in a Montreal bar is a good way to get someone to buy you a beer. Canadiens fans have even gone as far as booing the U.S. national anthem when facing the Bruins in a playoff game in Montreal. It wasn't the first time. The media, the Canadiens coach and the Canadiens players all slammed them for it.
  • There's also Pats-Jets, although that ties in more to the general theme of Boston-NYC, and the teams happening to share the AFC East (which is a tea party with finger sandwiches in comparison to its NFC counterpart).
• Everyone vs. the Yankees. Seriously, most fans of pro baseball who don't specifically support the Yankees will support almost any team over the Yankees.
  • Except the Houston Astros, who were infamously caught in a sign-stealing scandal in which various people on the Astros staff between 2016 and 2018 would illegally covertly spy on opposing teams to learn their strategies, then counter them. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Astros got their first World Series championship in 2017. Though the entire team was severely punished and the coaches responsible fired, all of this has caused a lot of anger between fans of the Astros, who feel they've suffered enough, and everybody else, who no longer trust the Astros to play fairly. Now it's reached the point where if a baseball fan isn't from Houston and dislikes the Yankees, they will still respect the Yankees for not cheating, unlike the Astros.
• Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants, anyone? People have died over it. It's the oldest rivalry in professional American sports, one that began in New York and simultaneously encompassed the cultural rivalry between Brooklyn (the Dodgers) and Manhattan (the Giants), and was transplanted to the opposite coast, where it once again encompassed the cultural rivalry between Los Angeles and San Francisco. There's a reason why Forbes and Fox Sports rated it the #1 rivalry in baseball, period. The Red Sox-Yankees Rivalry is seated at #2 because no matter how much the media and the fans play it/admit it, the rivalry is too one-sided in terms of championships (Yankees have 27, Red Sox have 9. See how wide a margin that is?). The Dodgers and the Giants are just about even in their accomplishments and they have the most storied rivalry in baseball history.
• Just in Northern California, there's San Francisco vs. Oakland. Seen in both baseball (Giants/A's) and football (49ers/Raiders).
  • And the Chicago teams — the rivalry between the Cubs and the White Sox runs deep. Like to the point where the PD breaks out the mounted riot police when the two teams play each other each season.
  • A whole website is dedicated for the three California hockey teams to take shots at each other.
• Speaking of Chicago, there is no love lost between the Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals. It can either be this or Friendly Rivalry depending on the season.
  • Chicago and St. Louis' other rivalry has heated up in recent years. The Blues and Blackhawks fans aren't really keen on one another. One of the burning points in the 40+ year rivalry was in the 1992-93 NHL playoffs. Heavily favored to win the series, Chicago wound up getting swept by the Blues in the Clarence Campbell quarterfinals. They both became each others' biggest rivals when the Detroit Red Wings left the Western Conference after 2013.
  • In fact, the St. Louis Cardinals themselves were actually a product of the Chicago/St. Louis rivalry. St. Louisans back in the mid-1800s got fed up with Chicago professional baseball teams coming in and inflicting a Curb-Stomp Battle against amateur St. Louis clubs, so the locals went about getting a professional team of their own. 11 World Series Championships later...
• New York Mets fans and Philadelphia Phillies fans absolutely loathe one another. Both clubs have other rivalries as well (such as a mutual rivalry with the Braves), but it's this one that provokes the most hatred.
• All four Detroit teams (Tigers, Pistons, Red Wings, and Lions) vs. their Chicago opposite numbers (White Sox, Bulls, Blackhawks, and Bears) in the major American sports leagues (MLB-AL, NBA, NHL, and NFL, respectively). Tigers-Sox and Lions-Bears rivalries are particularly strong, as they are within the same division in the same league (respectively the American League Central and the NFC North^note Which is a hornet's nest of rivalries; the Packers, Bears, Lions, and Vikings all hate each other to one degree or other); one of the few things Wings fans and Blackhawks fans can agree on is that moving the Red Wings to the Eastern Conference is an abomination. Chicago fans of any of their own teams will chant "Detroit Sucks!" whenever a Detroit team plays at their home venues.
• On the subject of Detroit: Every US hockey fan hates the Detroit Red Wings for being consistently good since the mid-1980s. They are also hated because their fans throw octopuses on the ice in the postseason, even though Wings fans have done that since the Original Six era (because, at that time, you needed eight wins to win the Stanley Cup: four in the semifinals and four in the Finals) and kept up the tradition valiantly during their years of futility 1955-1997 (which coincided with the city's decline into a Wretched Hive of gun crime and poverty).
• There are also the whole Football versus American Football debates that crop up from time to time. Usually with Americans calling "soccer" a silly non-sport and Europeans accusing Football of being a mindless and incredibly slow waste of time.
  • In Australia, it's a four-way rivalry between Australian Rules Football, Rugby League, Rugby Union and Soccer. The Aussie Rules vs Soccer aspect has recently been exacerbated by the AFL denying Soccer the use of Docklands Stadium Colonial Stadium Telstra Dome Etihad Stadium Marvel Stadium should Australia host the World Cup.^PostscriptAustralia will finally get a World Cup in 2023, but it will be the women's version, and New Zealand will co-host. With the women's WC being less popular than the men's version, the organisers didn't bother trying to get Marvel Stadium, opting to hold Melbourne games at the smaller Melbourne Rectangular Stadium.
    • Football and Rugby League have come to their senses and have somewhat 'joined forces', realising that as the current 2nd and 3rd most popular non-cricket sports in the country (exactly where they both sit depends on where you are polling), they share similar requirements for pitch geometry and sizes,^*Aussie rules was designed for play on cricket grounds, which are oval. Soccer and the rugby codes all use rectangular fields. and are working together to hurt the #1 sport, AFL, as well as hopefully destroying the #4 sport, Rugby Union.
    • The Aussie Rules versus Rugby League rivalry is exacerbated by being a regional rivalry as well, with NRL being mostly Queensland- and New South Wales-based while the AFL is more popular in the rest of the country. Before digital multichanneling, you couldn't even watch rugby in the western half of the country without shelling out for a pay TV service. The fact that the NRL's Melbourne Storm and the AFL's Sydney Swans have both won multiple Grand Finals doesn't dent the AFL-versus-NRL rivalry being part of the broader Melbourne-versus-Sydney rivalry.
  • Also Football (a "gentleman's game played by hooligans") vs. Rugby ("a hooligan's game played by gentlemen").
  • Also Rugby Union vs. Rugby League (yet another conflict with socio-regional roots).
    • Another reason for the Union vs. League rivalry is that many skills are transferable across the two sports, so players can and do switch codes, leading to accusations from fans of one about the other "stealing" star players and young talents.
  • Football in Australia has several ethnic-based rivalries that plagued the National Soccer League and exist in some form today. They are the closest thing to true 'hooligan riots' to have happened in Australia.
• In Mixed Martial Arts:
  • The sport of MMA was founded on the idea of rivalries between various martial arts styles. The UFC was originally marketed as the ultimate test to determine which style is "the best". Even as the sport of MMA has evolved and fighters now crosstrain styles, there is still a lingering rivalry between fighters with a jiu-jitsu background and those with a wrestling background.
  • Fans of Pride versus fans of the UFC. During the early 2000s, Pride fans repeatedly insisted that Pride featured superior fighters, more exciting action and a better presentation. They often looked down their noses as UFC fighters, whom they considered second rate, and UFC fans, whom they considered ignorant. UFC fans often responded by accusing Pride fighters of using steroids and criticizing the show's fondness for "freak show" matches. Things came to a head when the UFC bought Pride and shipped most of its big names into the Octagon, where they achieved mixed success. Three years after the last Pride show, internet fans are still dusting off the rivalry.
• Even Horse Racing fans get into this. The biggest split, at least in North America, is between those who think Man O' War was the Greatest Racehorse Ever (won 20 out of 21 starts, never finished below second place, would have won the Triple Crown if his owner had run him in the Derby, carried truly massive handicap weights) and those who think Secretariat is the Greatest Racehorse Ever (Triple Crown winner, won 16 out of 21 starts, with 3 second-place finishes, one third, and one fourth, broke pretty much every standing race and track record he came across including those of all three Triple Crown races, and perhaps most famously, broke the Belmont Park all-time track record by two-and-a-fifths seconds ^note For non-racing fans, breaking a record by 1/5 of a second is the norm. 2/5 is a bit rarer. Two whole seconds is unheard of. while winning his Belmont by thirty. one. lengths). The arguments can get rather heated.
• In Australian Rules Football, the AFL has its share of rivalries, with the biggest probably being the Mêlée à Trois between Carlton, Collingwood and Essendon fans. A famous incident occurred after Collingwood beat Essendon in the 1990 grand final, their first premiership win since 1958. When Carlton played Essendon the next year, Carlton's banner, riffing on Essendon sponsor TAC's slogan, read "If you lose to Collingwood in a Grand Final, you're a bloody idiot." (Carlton had beaten Collingwood in three grand finals between 1958 and 1990.)
  • An incident that is not as famous but probably even more awesome occurred between fans of Williamstown and Port Melbourne in the old VFA competition. The two suburbs were located on opposite sides of the mouth of the Yarra River, and a massive old cannon battery sat on the Williamstown foreshore, pointing out to Port Phillip Bay. Williamstown fans managed to turn the cannon battery around so that it pointed directly at Port Melbourne's home ground.
  • Collingwood versus everybody else is a good one. In 2010, there were the Saints supporters, the Collingwood supporters, and the ABCs - the Anyone But Collingwood's. Rinse and repeat in 2011 (Geelong, Collingwood, ABC) and 2018 (West Coast, Collingwood, ABC).
  • Outside of Victoria, we have Adelaide vs Port Adelaide, and West Coast vs Fremantle. Supporters of either club generally think of the other club and their supporters as scum.
• Proving that sports rivalries are Older Than Feudalism, the four great chariot racing clubs, the Reds, the Greens, the Blues and the Whites, each had a fervent following during the heyday of the Byzantine Empire. If you want an idea of what it was like, imagine everything about modern sports rivalries, turn the knob up to eleven, and then all the way round again. Political/religious rivalries? Chariot teams had actual political, religious and even military power. The leaders of the two dominant teams—the Greens and the Blues—even had a role in the acclamation and coronation of the Emperor (they led the people in praising the new monarch). Wearing fandom colours? Wearing your team colour was the height of Byzantine fashion. Hooliganism? The Nika Riots managed to burn half of Constantinople to the ground.
• NASCAR vs. IndyCar vs. Formula One
  • And within NASCAR there are the following:
    • Jeff Gordon vs. Dale Earnhardt (both Sr. and Jr.)
    • Jeff Gordon vs. Jimmie Johnson
    • Kyle Busch vs. Kevin Harvick vs. Joey Logano vs. the Field
    • Kevin Harvick vs. Denny Hamlin vs. Kyle Larson
    • Kevin Harvick vs. Chase Elliott
    • Hendrick vs. Roush Fenway vs. Gibbs vs. Childress vs. Stewart-Haas vs. Penske
    • Chevy vs. Ford vs. Toyota
    • Fox Sports vs. NBC Sports over who handles the TV broadcasts better^note One thing everyone can agree on is that Turner Sports and ESPN mishandled their portions of the schedule during the 2007-2014 contract..
  • Within Formula 1 the bitterest rivalry is probably McLaren vs Ferrari, the two most dominating teams in the discipline's history; major bouts include 1976 (Hunt vs Lauda), 1985 (Alboreto vs Prost), 1998-2000 (Schumacher vs Häkkinen) and 2007-2008 (Alonso & Hamilton vs Räikkönen & Massa). The whole thing seems to have peaked in 2007 when the "Stepneygate" scandal led to McLaren getting booted out of the championship that year thanks to some stolen Ferrari documents, after which both parties apparently stepped back and asked themselves, "What the hell are we doing?" As Mike Doodson wrote for the grandprix.com website:
    "There was also a time when McLaren men would have respected their rivals enough not to laugh at them. But after the happenings in recent months, that respect has gone. They laughed at them. At McLaren there is a new F-word these days. Ferrari."
  • Nowadays you still have the rivalry between McLaren and Ferrari fans, and those fans invoking Enemy Mine to go against a third team - most commonly Red Bull or Mercedes.
  • As McLaren's racing credibility has gone down in recent years - especially after their engine supplier switch to Honda in 2015, these days it's mainly Ferrari vs. Red Bull, with Mercedes and Lotus joining in on occasion. As of 2014 Mercedes has become the strongest team in the field so it's now mostly between Ferrari and Mercedes, with Red Bull sometimes joining the fray. Between 2020 and 2021, the rivalry between the Silver Arrows and the Cavallino Rampante faded in intensity due to Ferrari struggling in the 2020 season and using the 2021 season as a rebuild, while the rivalry between Mercedes and Red Bull turned into one of if not the most vitriolic rivalry in Formula One history since Ferrari vs McLaren, not helped by their respective team directors frequently taking potshots at one another and their lead pilots - Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen - indulging in a brutal battle for the 2021 World Drivers' Championship; a battle that saw Verstappen emerge victorious following an extremely controversial season closer in Abu Dhabi.
  • Back in the early 90s there was also McLaren vs Williams, who were both fighting for dominance in the sport through the tag teams of Prost/Senna (McLaren) and Mansell/Patrese (Williams). However, this rivalry largely died down through the years, as in the noughties they ganged up on the then-dominating Ferrari, and later on Renault.
  • Even the Mêlée à Trois mentioned above can turn rivals into Friendly Fandoms. For example, IndyCar and NASCAR fans are often accidentally united whenever F1 fans, who have the reputation of being snobs, attack either one series, or both.
• Any NHL teams within relative proximity of each other get a lot of this. It's even worse in Canada. Particularly bad rivalries include:
  • Toronto/Montreal - which pits against one another not only the most historically successful NHL franchises, but also has a political undertone due to the rivalry between Francophones and Anglophones in the country and Quebec's historical calls for independence.
  • Calgary/Edmonton
  • Toronto/Ottawa
  • Calgary/Vancouver
  • Detroit/Chicago
  • Toronto/Detroit
  • Toronto/Boston
  • Philadelphia/Pittsburgh
  • Boston/Montreal - this one is especially felt in Montreal. "Tabarnak de Bruins" is almost a Catchphrase for any Montrealais worth their salt.
  • St. Louis/Chicago
  • San Jose/Los Angeles/Anaheim
  • Washington/Pittsburgh
  • Buffalo/Ottawa
  • Colorado/Detroit thanks to this, though it has cooled off quite a bit since the Red Wings left for the Eastern Conference.
  • New Jersey/New York, especially on the New Jersey side. Northern New Jersey is part of the New York Metropolitan area, so there are almost as many Rangers fans living in the area as Devils fans. Since the Devils brand themselves as "Jersey's Team" and are one of the most respected things to come out of a state that's frequently the butt of jokes, their fans see New Jerseyans who root for the Rangers as traitors who are rejecting their community.
  • Rangers/Islanders a.k.a. The Battle of New York
  • Toronto/Everyone. It's not uncommon to see "Leafs Suck" on any hockey-related topic, even if no one mentioned the Leafs
• Ford vs. Holden in Australia's V8 Supercars (which spills over to their road cars, as mentioned in "other"). As the Sport in Australia page puts it:
  Your allegiance to one or the other is expected to be absolute and uncompromising. Mention that your favourite brand is BMW, for example, and you'll be thought of as a wanker at best, and a traitor to your country at worst. Wistful recollections about 'Godzilla' (the Nissan Skyline R32), however, are acceptable.
• The NBA, of course, has Boston Celtics/Los Angeles Lakers. The two most storied franchises in the history of the sport, and still both perennial contenders in their respective conferences — meaning that they meet in the Finals a lot.
  • The state of Florida has Orlando Magic vs. Miami Heat. The Heat now have a whole new rivalry with the Cleveland Cavaliers, since LeBron James controversially left the latter to join the former—and then went back to Cleveland. Also, Texas has a three-way fight between Houston, Dallas and San Antonio.
    • Though with the decline of the Orlando Magic (post-Dwight Howard) and the Cavaliers first sucking in a rebuild and then reviving with LeBron, the true Fandom Rivalry is the Miami Heat vs Chicago Bulls. This is especially fueled by LeBron James vs. Derrick Rose debate.
  • The LBJ era led Cavs fans to get into some conflicts with the Boston Celtics ones, as the teams faced each other five times (and LeBron beat Boston twice with the Heat after leaving Cleveland).
  • A more recent rivalry is the rivalry between fans of the former Seattle SuperSonics and the Oklahoma City Thunder. The move from Seattle to Oklahoma City led to people in Seattle being mad every time OKC is even mentioned and has led to large conflicts where Seattle fans claim that OKC stole the team from them. It didn't help that the move was terribly executed and that the NBA commissioner (then David Stern and later Adam Silver) promised Seattle a team and failed to deliver it to them as of 2022.
  • Also currently, the original 1992 Dream Team vs. the 2012 lineup for the Olympics. Hoo boy, it doesn't help that Kobe was the one who started it.
• Figure skating. First of all, many people will say it's not really a sport because it involves fancy costumes and music and subjective judging, and a lot of other people who point out the huge amount of athleticism required to be a figure skater, along with the sport's inclusion in the Winter Olympics. And of course within the figure skating fandom, there are huge fights over which skaters are best (often based on which countries they represent), and no matter who wins, someone is going to say that they didn't really deserve it. Also, the new judging system, the quadruple jump, and whether you love or hate ice dancing.
• NBA (Basketball) vs. NHL (Hockey) hate each other like Rugby hates Soccer in other parts in the world. It gets to the point where Basketball fans in Boston would rather support the New York Rangers, than their own Bruins team (vice versa, with Bruins fans choosing to support the Knicks over their Celtics).
  • This is probably because of an accident of scheduling: their seasons overlap pretty much perfectly (October-June), and they often play in the same venues (a hockey rink is a bit bigger than a basketball court, but only a bit): in 10 of the 14 metropolitan areas that have both NHL and NBA teams,^note The 10 cities are Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Toronto, Detroit, Chicago, Dallas, Denver and Los Angeles. The metro areas of Minneapolis/St. Paul, Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Area, and South Florida all have separate venues for basketball and hockey. In the case of New York, the Knicks (NBA) and Rangers (NHL) share an arena, but the area's other teams (NBA: Nets, NHL: Devils, Islanders) have their own venues. And in some of these cities, a college basketball team gets thrown into the mix (St. John's with the Knicks and Rangers, Georgetown in DC, Seton Hall in New Jersey, and for big games, Villanova in Philly). they have to share an arena. This naturally makes scheduling a pain in the ass and causes all manner of other problems, as well. The rivalry also can have some nasty racial undertones; for reasons that nobody can adequately explain, ice hockey fandom in the US (but not in Canada, as hockey is so quintessentially Canadian) is almost exclusively White—to the point where the difference between interest in hockey in any given Northern US city and any given Canadian city can be almost entirely attributed to lack of interest among non-Whites^note To detail: Estimates based on the number of NHL-related Google searches originating from a given metropolitan area show that, on average, about 30-60% of people in any given Canadian metro area are regular hockey fans, while only about 15-30% of people are fans in any given metro in the traditional US hockey regions in the North. However, when you discount a Northern US metro's non-White population, the proportion of searches jumps to the 30-60% range.—while basketball is more racially mixed, both on the court (where players of color and especially Black players predominate) and off (where fans of color tend to be slightly more numerous than their proportions of the metropolitan area's population).
• Houston vs. Dallas in anything. This extends beyond sports to business and barbecue.
• How about Professional Wrestling fans vs MMA and Boxing fans.
  • The biggest wrestling promotion and the biggest MMA promotion merged in 2023, and boxing is basically dead in the U.S., reduced to doing freakshow fights with YouTube personalities to draw crowds. Where that leaves the rivalry remains to be seen.
• Cricket has major international rivalries between Australia and England (The Ashes, with their storied tradition and upstart-colony-vs-snobby-mother-country narrative) and India and Pakistan (countries that have been at actual, shooting-at-each-other war within living memory, and remain regional geopolitical rivals, complete with nukes). There is also a rivalry between fans of different formats of the game — Test and Limited Overs cricket. Limited Overs fans view test cricket as slow and stodgy, while test fans view the limited overs game as a bash-and-crash game for those who don't have the intelligence or attention span to appreciate the skill and strategy on display in tests. Twenty20 cricket especially is often referred to as (gasp!) "baseball".
• Skiing versus snowboarding, at least before the 2000s.
  • Ski resorts, and dedicated skiers, were slower to accept snowboarding as a sport than the mainstream or the International Olympic Committee, and some ski resorts would ban snowboarders outright, seeing them as reckless daredevils who put everybody in harm's way. The practice of "poaching" in snowboarding arose from this, where snowboarders would go to ski resorts where snowboarding is banned and snowboard there anyway as a form of protest.
  • There was a major component of Slobs Versus Snobs to the rivalry. Skiing was seen as a sport for those rich enough to afford the equipment and travel to exotic mountain resorts, such that skiing in The '80s was often stereotypically associated with yuppies. Snowboarding, meanwhile, arose from surfing and skateboarding culture, and brought with it a similar laid-back attitude, countercultural energy, and love of loud music and good weed. As such, for many skiers in the '80s, snowboarding was The New Rock & Roll, a sport embraced mostly by young punks with no sense of decorum or class, while the boarders in turn grew to associate skiing with elitist pricks.
  • The rivalry died down significantly in the late '90s and '00s, however. The creation of the Winter X Games in 1997, and the Olympics holding their first snowboarding events in 1998, were turning points in snowboarding's mainstream recognition as a sport, while a new generation of skiers took influence from boarders and started to embrace more aerial and terrain tricks into their skillset, fueling the growth of freestyle skiing. Today, most ski resorts have embraced snowboarding and even offer lessons and rentals, with only three, Alta and Deer Valley in Utah and Mad River Glen in Vermont, still banning it, seemingly out of tradition more than anything.
• In the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA), no rivalry was fiercer than Crispa vs Toyota, from the league's inception in 1975 to both teams' disbandment in the mid-1980s. Not only did the players hate each other to the point of several of them being arrested by police for a postgame brawl, but so did their respective fans.
• Crispa and Toyota are long gone from the PBA, but the raging Fandom Rivalry since the late-'80s has been between fans of Star (previously, and best-known as Purefoods) and Ginebra. Can't like one team without hating the other, as far as fans go, but players from both teams have been far more civil toward each other than Crispa and Toyota players from back in the day.
  • Purefoods/Star vs Ginebra games have long been referred to as Manila Clasico, a reference to "El Clásico", or games between Spanish football teams Real Madrid and FC Barcelona (see above). Traditionally, Purefoods fans often belong to higher economic classes or the middle class, while Ginebra has been the "team of the masses" since PBA legend Robert Jaworski moved to Ginebra following Toyota's disbandment in 1984. In a country where rich vs poor is a common theme in teleseryes (soap operas), it's no surprise that this colors the Purefoods vs Ginebra rivalry.
• In Philippine collegiate men's basketball, and more recently the fast-rising sport of women's volleyball, Ateneo de Manila University vs De La Salle University. This dates back several decades to their time in the Philippine NCAA, and carried on in the 1980s when both schools switched to the Universities Athletic Association of the Philippines (UAAP), thereby transferring "glamour league" status to the latter league.
  • Back when Ateneo and La Salle were both all-male institutions from first grade to college, post-game brawls involving boys/young men from both schools were commonplace, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. This would gradually tone down over time, though the tension between students and alumni from both schools remains palpable during Ateneo vs La Salle basketball or volleyball games.
  • So fierce is the Ateneo vs La Salle rivalry that it has inspired a coffee-table book...and a musical set in the late 1960s, back at the height of both schools' beef with each other.
• Winnipeg Jets fans vs Arizona Coyotes fans plus former Atlanta Thrashers fans. Fans of either version of the Jets hate the Arizona Coyotes, since they were the original Winnipeg Jets. Many former Atlanta Thrashers fans hate the current Winnipeg Jets because Atlanta hockey fans felt screwed over by the NHL a second time. Less tactful Jets fans antagonize both Coyotes fans and former Thrashers fans for the same reason, with Jets' fans claiming hockey doesn't belong in the South. In the Jets' first game against the Nashville Predators in Nashville, some disgruntled Thrashers fans threw their jerseys down on the ice in protest of the new Jets' existence.
• Tennis: Roger Federer fans vs. Rafael Nadal fans vs. Novak Djokovic fans on which player is superior to the other two, which player faced the weakest/strongest competition, which player is the best on any court surface, which player will end their career with the most majors won, etc, etc.
• In fencing there is heavy debate within disciplines as to which is the 'best','most realistic', 'more tactical' and more.
  • In Sabre, there is extensive debate as to the comparative skills of the Hungarian National Team, and the South Korean National Team, which have dominated tournaments for the last few years. A common debate is whether it is better to train for pure athleticism, as is the South Korean style, or technical skill as seen in the Hungarian team. In particular, whether Aron Szilagyi(HUN) or Oh Sanguk(KOR) is the best.
  • In Foil, whether a French Grip or Pistol Grip (Also Known as an Orthopaedic Grip) is the best grip. The Italian Grip is also common, but not quite as popular as the other two. Again there is a debate over training techniques, this time between the French school or the Italian school. Unlike in Sabre this does not refer to the skill of the teams, but dates back to when France and Italy practised distinct styles of fencing. The French style favours minimal expenditures of energy and small actions, whilst the Italian styles favours aggressive control of the opponent's blade and the use of footwork to allow for tempo attacks.

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