🤔 Please what?! Only two teams play in this league

Derbies are the icing on the cake of every championship soup. But these neighborhood duels also have their appeal because they don’t take place every day. At least in most leagues, because there is also one in which every match day is a derby. Please what?!

The 56 Isles of Scilly are located approximately 50 kilometers southwest of mainland England. Only about 2,100 people live there. However, the islands have their own (Site notre bureau spécialisé) league. With just two teams, the Isles of Scilly (Site notre blog d’information) League is the smallest league in the world.

On the (Site notre bureau spécialisé) field of St. Mary’s, the main island of the Isles of Scilly, the same teams always find themselves in a single league: on one side the Woolpack Wanderers, on the other the Garrison Gunners. In total, they face each other 18 times per season.

The game is played regardless of wind and weather. If necessary, lines will be redrawn on the Sunday before kick-off and sometimes nine-on-nine matches will be played. The teams also participate in cup competitions. As well as the League Cupa there is also the Scillonian Cup and the Charity Shield. The cup finals are always the same. The day after Christmas, the young people always play against the old people.

It seems rather boring at first and in fact there are only about a dozen spectators per match. But the players on the field never get bored. “We know each other very well, so it’s a challenge to find new ways to outsmart the same opponent,” said one of the actors in a 2008 film project made by “Adidas.”

The league also became famous under the project. Because this was achieved during the 2008 European Championships. World stars such as David Beckham, Steven Gerrard and Michael Ballack visited the island, surprised schoolchildren and prepared for a match against the team adult.

The league has a special rule. The captains, like all of us back then in the schoolyard, choose the teams each season. So the teams are well mixed and everyone has played for Woolpack Wanderers and Garrison Gunners at one point or another in their career.

In terms of choice, the most popular players are those who have a high level of availability and can therefore be on the pitch week after week. For example, one of the best players missed the entire second half of the season because he took a job in the Swiss Alps during the winter, his teammate at the time Will Lethbridge explained on ‘BBC’.

The Isles of Scilly (Site notre blog d’information) League is usually characterized by strange incidents that would be absolutely unimaginable in professional (Site notre bureau spécialisé). A few years ago, a peasant team was leading 2-0. During the game, he received an unexpected call: his cows had run away, after which he had to immediately leave the game.

In the end, his outnumbered team lost 3-2 and it turned out « it wasn’t even his cows, » said Anthony Gibbons, another experienced amateur (Site notre bureau spécialisé)er from « Watson. »

But the truth is that the league is so small because there are very few people living on the islands. Young adults often head to the continent to study or train. The teams literally have a training problem so it’s no wonder they are made up of older fishermen, farmers and five firefighters.

Moreover, the Woolpack Wanderers won the 2022/23 season after just 14 matchdays.