Much has been spoken of the unifying power of football. During international tournaments entire nations unite in their love for their team, their passion for the beautiful game and their hatred for other, more successful nations. (Editor’s note: In Scotland’s case, we just hate England to be honest.)

But could this unifying power work on a site put together by football fans, all of whom support different teams? At international level we know who we’re behind, and that’s cool. At club level though, we pull in more directions than a poorly organized tug of war competition. What we need is a common cause to get behind, a team with which none of us have any affiliation or loyalty. A team selected completely at random whose fortunes we can follow through thick and thin.

In order to choose this team, we took every country that has a UEFA approved league, minus the home nations. We then assigned each nation a number. Using a random number generator we selected the country of origin for our team. Then, using the same number generator we chose the level of the football pyramid they currently play at. As you can see, this was pretty scientific stuff, not in any way scribbled on the back of a napkin.

This is TOTALLY how we picked the team...honest! Courtesy of Ojan

This ultra scientific process has given us the club side that will bear the hopes of everyone at Born Offside in the 2012/2013 season. They’re the Ćurani , the Plavi Tim, they’re everyone’s favourite Serbian SuperLiga side; they are FK JAGODINA!

 FK Jagodina: The Great Blue Hope

So let’s take a look at Born Offside’s new official team. Firstly, just to give you an idea of what we’re working with here, in researching this piece we visited the official club site. Obviously, the text is all in Serbian, so ‘translate page into English’ was clicked, yielding the usual, incomprehensible results. Off to Wiki we popped, where we discovered the entire Wikipedia entry for FK Jagodina is just that translated text, copied and pasted over. Feast your eyes, if you will, on the World War II period in FK Jagodina’s history:

“In outumn 1938 JSK (Jagodinski sportski klub) is formed. During the Second World War, 1941 to 1945, despite all difficulties, it acomlishes major results. In 1943 it plays 45 matches of which wins 32 and draws 3, archiving the top position of the regional league of Morava.”

It’s almost impossible to stop yourself saying all of that in a Serbian accent.

All digressions aside, FK Jagodina are a magnificent club with a rich and vibrant history. They were sort of formed in 1919, when one of their predecessor clubs – FK Zora – started up. FK Zora became SK Sparta, – remember, FK Zora are the 1919 team. FK Zora then seem to completely disappear from the story, and FK Jagodiva end up being formed by the merger of FK Morava (who were once the JSK mentioned above), OFK Kablovi and FK Jedinstvo.

So there has been a club in the area since 1919, and FK Jagodina are the club there now. Therefore FK Jagodina have been around since 1919, and you can shut up. My head hurts.

Coached by ex-Serbian national team number two Simo Krunić, Jagodina are a Serbian SuperLiga powerhouse. They finished fourth last season, getting them into the first round of the Europa League for the first time ever– incidentally, the draw for this round happened on Monday and Jagodina drew the mighty FC Ordabasy of Kazakhstan Premier League fame, a game that we at Born Offside await in sweaty anticipation.

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