Derby Days, Copenhagen: Brondby vs FC Copenhagen

The Athletic is attending some of the most ferocious derbies across Europe, charting the history of the continent’s most deep-rooted and volatile rivalries. The series began last season, covering 10 combustible fixtures from Athens to Anfield. We attended De Klassieker and the Derby della Capitale, the Eternal Derby and the Old Firm.

Now, to kick off our second series of fixtures, we visit Scandinavia and the football match which divides the Danish capital.

Copenhagen is a dream of a city.

It has cobbled streets and Renaissance beauty. Beautiful brick and stone towers jut up and out into the skyline, and even the colours and styles that clash seem somehow to work. It is place of glass and precise angles, and of culture, food, art, sophistication and rich history, all of which sits between waters that shimmer like blue glass and in air so pure that it barely touches the skin.

On Sunday, 20 minutes down the S-train tracks to the west, the sun is shining and the air is just as clear.

Then, in a stadium that holds 29,000 people but packs them tight and holds them close, Van Halen’s “Jump” pulses out from the tannoy, flares crackle and blue and yellow smoke plumes out from behind the goal.

The afternoon turns dark, the noise punches in on the pitch from all sides and Brondby against FC Copenhagen, the city’s first derby of the Superliga season, is under way.

Retreat 48 hours and in Frederiksberg, to the west of Copenhagen’s centre, Jacob Neestrup was leading his players through their Friday training session. It is open training — people can just walk in — and members of the media, the public, and a class of schoolchildren have gathered on a small, brick gallery as the first team are drilled on the pitches below.

Kasper Larsen, founder of FC Copenhagen fansite Kvart I bold, is there. So is Nanna Moller Karlsen, who runs the Brondby site 3point.dk.

Nanna and Kasper co-host a weekly podcast from either side of the derby divide. Nanna does not want to be there. Not two days before the derby. But she has been marched behind enemy lines having lost a bet on the podcast. Her forfeit is to conduct the rival manager’s interview. So, at the end of the session, from underneath a Brondby-yellow bucket hat, she quizzes Neestrup as neutrally as possibly, grimacing through his answers, while Kasper grins away in the background.

Everyone is in on the joke. Neestrup knows what is happening. So do the children watching nearby from behind a trellis fence. Afterwards, as Nanna heads back past the schoolchildren and the players who have stopped to sign autographs, one of the boys recognises her and asks if she will sign his FC Copenhagen shirt.

She signs his arm instead.

“I’m not signing that shirt,” she says, laughing.

Nanna Moller Karlsen interviews Neestrup (The Athletic)

For a long time, Brondby (BIF) were the power in Danish football. They are 11-time national champions and won 10 of those titles in the two decades between 1985 and 2005. Both of the Laudrup brothers played for the club, as did Peter Schmeichel, Kim Vilfort and John Jensen.

They have only captured one championship since, in 2021, but they remain one of Denmark’s best-supported clubs — and that popularity extends throughout the country.

FC Copenhagen (FCK) are extremely well-supported, too. They consistently average the highest attendance in the Danish Superliga, but that support is more localised, concentrated within the city and its nearest surroundings.

FCK have won the Superliga 15 times and 14 of those championships have been accumulated since the turn of the century. If they win the title this year, it will be three in a row. That displacement is one of the rivalry’s fault lines. But there is also a social divide. Brondby is a working-class area. It is not as affluent as the city centre, nor some of the other, more gentrified districts in Copenhagen.

Yet the biggest different is ideological. FCK’s history only encompasses 31 years. In 1992, they were created from two old teams — Kjobenhavns Boldklub (KB) and Boldklubben 1903 (B1903) — and, for Brondby fans, that is the fundamental difference.

With the session over, the training ground beginning to empty and the pitches dappled by an autumn sun, Kasper and Nanna sit with The Athletic at the foot of the steps that lead down to the pitch.

“By nature, we don’t like each other,” Nanna says. “It started when the club was formed. We have seen our club work its way up the ranks and then Copenhagen just came in. It was more like a firm than a club. There is a history from the two clubs (from which) Copenhagen is based. But they just made a new club. With a new name.”

“Nanna tells a good story,” Kasper counters, “but I think their fans are hysterical about this. They are not old. In 1964 two clubs from Brondby got together; 30 years later, two clubs from the Copenhagen area joined together too.”

Kasper is understandably attached to his club’s history prior to 1992, too. His father was actually a Danish title-winner with B1903 in the 1960s and there are plenty of fans, like him, who can trace their own lineage back before 1992 to one of those original teams.

When they are together, Kasper and Nanna have broadcasters’ rhythm. They know when to let the other talk. But they know when and how to dig at each other, too.

“They’re arrogant. They’re just… arrogant.”

Nanna’s description is not glib. Neither is it the throwaway insult it might be in England, Spain or Germany. This is an issue of national psyche.

“Yes, we are arrogant,” says Kasper, cheerfully. “But I like it. Every year we say that we want to win the league and qualify for the Champions League. I want that.”

Brondby IF was formed in a merger of two clubs in 1964 (The Athletic)

This is another nerve in the rivalry — a philosophical difference around which these rivals argue.

FCK are bold in their aims; they have always been blunt about what they want to achieve. They are open in their desire to win titles and play in European football and, traditionally, that is not a very Danish quality. Nanna and Kasper agree on that. Their reaction as to how that orthodoxy is challenged by FCK is what divides them.

Brondby are different. Among the supporters who spoke to The Athletic, fondness for the community was the common tenet. They are proud of their area and their club, and that the tone of their matchdays is still defined by local volunteers, either on grills, or turnstiles, or behind the bars that spring up before games.

Success has become less important. In a way, given how successful FCK have been, it has had to.

“For 16 long years, we won nothing. We almost got relegated and we almost went bankrupt, but it was actually in those times that I got the confirmation that this was the right club for me.”

Kasper agrees.

“They have community. They are very good at selling themselves as a big family, I have to give them that.”

But there is a danger to that community and it is one stalking clubs like Brondby all over the world. In August 2022, they were sold to David Blitzer’s Global Football Holdings — Blitzer also owns a separate stake in the Premier League club Crystal Palace — and are now part of a pan-European multi-club stable that includes Augsburg, ADO Den Haag, Estoril, SK Beveren and Alcorcon. The homogeneity and servitude threatened is anathema to so many core principles that disagreements and division among supporters is inevitable. It is happening at Brondby now and it is becoming a significant problem.

“It’s been the hardest year of my life as a fan,” Nanna says.

“I have had a lot of pain, but this one has been the most difficult because it has really challenged our identity. For some Brondby fans, it’s totally fine. For others, it’s a deal-breaker and there are some supporters who will never come back to the stadium.”

Concern about the future transcends the rivalry. Whatever the fundamental differences between the two clubs, Kasper knows that Brondby, FC Copenhagen, and all sorts of other teams, inside Denmark, Scandinavia and across the world, are entering a period during which even something as fundamental as individual purpose is no longer guaranteed.

“I know that my club will be for sale. Not now, but in the future. We are Danish-owned and I don’t like the owners, but I know what I’ve got.”

Anti-GFH banners in among the Brondby fans (The Athletic)

As the game begins, banners protesting GFH’s ownership hang from the Brondby end. The two tiers are separated by a whole line of drummers and, in the opening minutes, the home side hammer away at FCK to the sound of their supporters’ beat.

They win a succession of corners and from one of the last, only a brilliant save from Kamil Grabara prevents them from taking the lead. Grabara is currently recovering from a facial injury and wears a protective mask that, with his long ponytail, makes him looks like a villain from a low-budget horror film.

Three days before the game, after FCK surrendered a two-goal lead to Galatasaray in the Champions League, he described Istanbul as a “shithole” on Instagram on his way home. Grabara does not scare easily; in fact, he revels in adversity and he seems to love every second of keeping goal beneath Brondby’s ultras and their shower of hostility.

Grabara makes a second excellent save, but not before he is beaten. From one of the corners, FCK fail to clear and Josip Radosevic hooks a volley into the bottom corner to give Brondby the lead. It sends a tremor through the stadium. The Sydsiden (the south side) terrace quivers yellow and blue.

(Lars Ronbog / FrontZoneSport via Getty Images)

This game has seen brilliant volleys before.

At FCK’s Parken stadium in June 2001, Sibu Zuma scored the most important goal in their history. It was voted the Superliga’s goal of that decade. In 2013 it was even voted the club’s greatest moment.

With FCK on the cusp of their second league title and holding a 1-0 lead over Brondby at Parken, Zuma scored a bicycle kick so audacious that it could scarcely have seemed real. It also all but confirmed the win and the championship. There is a monument carved in its memory outside the stadium, capturing Zuma in mid-air.

South African Legend, Sibusiso Zuma's goal for FC Copenhagen in their win over rivals, Brondby helped them win their first league cup in a decade.
It was voted the greatest moment in their history.
It won the 2001 Danish Goal of the Year & Goal of the Decade.
— African Football (@AfricaFootballZ) April 4, 2022

For Pablo Bresciani, that was the moment when the dynamic between the two clubs changed — when the power shift occurred. FCK won the title in their first-ever season, but they sank into mediocrity for the rest of the decade and had finished all the way down in eighth in 2000. Those were years of inferiority, sometimes ridicule too. Zuma’s volley changed that.

Pablo was originally a B1903 fan before the merger and he has seen FCK’s entire lifespan and the changing nature of the local rivalry. He has watched his club attract younger fans, some of whom are drawn to it by success and the bright lights of the Champions League, and — like Kasper Larsen — tells The Athletic that he enjoys the club’s ambition. He has also seen it evolve socially and is proud of what it represents.

“The most important value I see is the embrace of all people. We don’t care about colour or sexual orientation. We want to be a club for all of Copenhagen.“

Local identity is important. Sektion 12, the club’s ultras, have often featured the Copenhagen skyline in their choreography, including on Champions League nights. Among some healthy competition across Europe their artwork and pyrotechnics have often been among the most spectacular.

But Pablo also knows what it is to travel to Brondby as an FCK fan on matchday.

“It’s terrible,” he says. “Logistically, it’s a nightmare. The experience now I think is a bit better and the police have improved a little. They are actually talking to fans, but it’s still a mess. In the old days, the police used to make the route for the march right through the area where the Brondby supporters meet and we could be sure that there would be stones and bottles thrown at us. It was crazy.”

(The Athletic)

In the far left corner of the ground, Pablo is high up in the second tier to see a fabulous second half develop. It becomes not just an advert for the rivalry, but also for the attacking intent with Danish football and the depth of feeling it inspires.

FCK are 1-0 down at the break but, when they return, their press is harder and higher. Within 10 minutes, they have their equaliser. The ball breaks to Diogo Goncalves and he whistles in a low shot that buckles Patrick Pentz’s legs in goal and leaves him watching. There is a microsecond of silence — a tiny, tiny pause — before bedlam. Sektion 12 comes to life.

At the foot of their stand, bright red flares are lit while their capo, stripped to the waist, howls into his megaphone as the smoke and afternoon haze swirls around him.

Danish football is in the midst of a boom.

Between the 2018-19 season and 2022-23, average attendances across the league rose from 6,300 to 9,900. Some of that is attributable to a post-pandemic surge and a new determination to take part in public life.

It is also the legacy of the Danish national team’s performances at Euro 2020 and their stirring progress in the aftermath of Christian Eriksen’s cardiac arrest. That team and their football altered the perception of the game and changed the types of people attending. There are many more women and children in stadiums — club policies have helped to encourage that — but it is also fashionable now.

And its appeal is not solely local.

Henry Nicholls lives in London and has been an Arsenal season ticket holder for over 30 years. He is also an invaluable source of contacts and knowledge for anyone trying to explore Danish football. But his interest is not rooted in Euro 2020 or the pandemic. Instead, it owes everything to Thomas Delaney.

“I was just messing around on YouTube and that little box that tells you what’s coming up next had this picture of (Delaney), in front of a great wall of pyro,” he says.

“Initially, I thought: ‘Oh, Delaney — he must be English or Irish and playing abroad’, so I watched the documentary. It was all about his last year at Copenhagen and I remember thinking that the league had serious atmosphere, the quality looked good, and I wondered why I had never engaged with it.”

That quickly changed. Over time, Henry also gave others the opportunity to do the same. He started a Twitter account. That became a website and eventually a podcast. He began writing fine, detailed articles too.

“People were really excited that someone outside Denmark was taking an interest and so they were generous with their time in helping me understand things.

“It just grew from there. Through the journey I’ve been on, and every time I’ve been out to Denmark, I’ve met a bunch of people. Now, I get people emailing saying: ‘If you want to come and watch a Viborg game, you can come and stay at my house’. People are so generous.”

Henry has a wealth of stories. One tale is very familiar — the Superliga has restored something that he felt had been lost.

“The Premier League is so removed. Denmark still has betting companies and some of the more unsavoury things, but it reminds me of the football that I remember. Not in a condescending way, but because fans still seem to matter to teams. In England, television revenue matters much more than gate receipts. In Denmark, it’s the opposite.”

(The Athletic)

Alex Evans is also an Arsenal fan. He moved to Copenhagen from London for work in 2019 at a time when, with Arsenal suffering through a particularly fallow period, he had grown disenchanted with life at the Emirates Stadium and was searching for something different. He found it.

The pandemic separated Alex from his wife. She was trapped back in London when lockdown began and, isolated and alone for months, he gravitated towards Danish football once it returned.

Four years later, he is a season ticket holder at Parken, and has grown a deep affection for both the team and the Danish game as a whole. He loves the positive football, he says, and the opportunity to see young players before they go mainstream.

He loves the games too, of course.

“I’d been to European football before, but I think I had a bit of arrogance about how good the atmosphere in England was.”

The key elements of that atmosphere are pyrotechnic fire and choreos, the weight of noise too, but Alex talks of the closeness that he found in Danish football and the lack of distance between the team and its supporters. Literally so in some instances. He lives close to Parken and just a few doors down from Andreas Cornelius, one of the team’s centre-forwards.

But — and this is a common story among British football fans now living in different countries — the game has helped him to assimilate, with the other fans around him part of his own micro-society.

“A lot of my friends here I’ve made either via playing football or watching football. In the stadium, I chat to the people in front of me in a way that I would never in another walk of life. That’s the great thing about football. For 90 minutes, 15 times a season, you sit and talk to someone you otherwise wouldn’t. At a time when we’re talking about mental health, too, I think that’s really special.”

(The Athletic)

Neither side ever stops trying to win.

With 20 minutes left, Brondby cut Copenhagen open down the left wing. A beautifully intricate passage of play snakes down the touchline and ends with a Marko Divkovic cross and a lunging finish from Ohi Omoijuanfo that sends the ball back across goal and into the bottom corner. Grabara gets nowhere near it. He pounds the ground and screams at his defenders as the stadium shakes around him.

But FCK have their ego — the one they love and that everyone else despises — and one of their players has it in abundance.

Roony Bardghji will be a star. He has already captured the attention of every major club in Europe and somewhere in the stadium, as at every game he plays, a colony of scouts is busy taking notes on another game that he changes for good.

Bardghji is still just 17. Born in Kuwait but now representing Sweden, he is an electrifying prospect and, when he equalises with five minutes left, he celebrates with the posturing swagger that FCK fans love about their club. He scores at the home end, driving the ball high into the net off the goalkeeper’s legs, and he runs to the corner, as close as he dares to get to the Sydsiden, and bows extravagantly in front of them. It is fabulously naughty. And he knows it.

It gets worse for Brondby. They are still seething over Bardghji’s celebration when, in the 89th minute, he wins the game. A loose ball breaks fortuitously at the back post and he places it back across goal, past Pentz, and into the far corner. Bardghji races away. There is no practised routine this time. Instead, he heads for the bench and the throng of coaches and substitutes who have spilled out on to the pitch.

He has just won the derby. They know it.

The sea of yellow behind the goal sags as its energy expires, drifting out of the stand and then up and away.

They have just lost the derby. They know that too.

Bardghji celebrates his winner for FCK (Lars Ronbog / FrontZoneSport via Getty Images)

There is anger in this rivalry. To some it is personal, social and economic. For others, the games are referenda as to what a club should be, and how it should behave. To many, it is probably all of those tensions, felt all at the same time.

There is also menace. An edge exists in Copenhagen and, over the last decade, both clubs have attracted negative headlines for the behaviour of their fans. Two years ago, it was mandated that two of the four derby games be played without away support in the stadium, in retaliation for trouble at previous matches.

Parts of the media commentary in Denmark are insistent about a hooligan problem. To some supporters, the reporting around the violence has been exaggerated. One FCK fan, who asked to remain nameless, told The Athletic that some resent the amount of public money spent on policing football, and believes that agenda drives the tone of the coverage.

The same supporter, in a common complaint made by fans from all sorts of teams across Europe, questioned how rarely the actions of the police at these games are reported on in the same way, or with the same relish.

But there are good stories too, even if they come from bad.

In August 2022, Rasmus Augustesen was recovering after watching Brondby lose the derby the day before. His body was aching and his voice was hoarse, but there was something worse than a 4-1 defeat to FCK. A video had surfaced online. It was shot on an S-train shortly after the game and it showed a muscular Brondby fan intimidating a pair of much smaller, younger Copenhagen supporters.

He can be seen demanding the replica shirts off their backs and then, after they have handed them over, can be heard threatening to burn them as the two FCK fans sit topless and humiliated in the carriage.

Rasmus hated it. That was not his club. Nor did it represent the community.

“Brondby has been in my heart for my whole life,” he says. “I can mirror myself on the club’s values, in its history and its culture.

“That was so far away from what I know and from all the people I know. We can be enemies when the game is on because we may view football from different perspectives. We have different social lives and different ways of growing up, but you shouldn’t threaten people. It was very important to do something because it only takes two guys to ruin the reputation of 100,000 people.”

Rasmus got in touch with the woman who shot the video and, together, they set up a fund to replace the shirts. Within a few minutes they had raised 5,000DKK (£581; $710). The donations came from everywhere. From Brondby fans who felt the same way, from Copenhagen supporters too, but from all over the country, and from the amateur and professional leagues alike.

The violence and hostility exists. The Copenhagen derby bubbles with animosity when the teams are on the pitch. But the reaction to that incident and the response it provoked seemed more typical of the spirit described within Danish football — of the closeness claimed by Alex and Henry, of the sense of community that binds Nanna and Rasmus to their club, and of the determination that the game should be for everyone, espoused by Pablo and Kasper, but shared by everyone to whom The Athletic spoke.

Brondby stadium on derby day (The Athletic)

When the game is over and with the fans drifting out of the stadium, the Sydsiden terrace lies naked and exposed. A few Brondby fans are still sat on its steps, draining beers among thousands of empty plastic cups and all the debris that has fallen from above.

Brondby is hard-working. Its tenement buildings and town planning are very different to the centre of Copenhagen, but parts of it are green and deeply beautiful too.

On the way back to the station, fans walk in the brilliant autumn sunshine, past a windmill on the left, a pair of weeping willows on the right, and freshly cut grass that leads between the two and then back to the main road. It is a different world to the city centre. And by the time the trains rattle back into Copenhagen, almost all of those yellow and blue shirts have disappeared. They are under jackets or jumpers, or else they never make it that far at all, either heading off in a different direction or getting off long before Copenhagen’s bell towers, its glass and its perfect, glinting waters slide back into view.

One football rivalry, one city.

Two clubs, two different worlds.