One particularly appealing quality of European football for people like the author who are desperate to exude an air of worldliness, is the lack of official club nicknames. Manchester United, for example, are known popularly as the Red Devils*, Southampton as the Saints, and Everton as the Toffees. In none of those instances, however, does the nickname appear either on the club’s uniform or its official crest. Rather, the nicknames are largely — or, at least, more largely than in the States — the province of supporters and journalists, lending some (perhaps illusory) sense of the communal to the wildly capitalist affair of spectator sports.

*A devil actually does appear on the current iteration of Man U’s crest, but was added nearly a hundred years after the original formation of the club.

Nor is this sort of arrangement entirely alien to American baseball. The Brooklyn Base Ball Club was known alternately as the Grays, the Grooms, the Bridegrooms, the Superbas, and the Robins, before officially adopting the (Trolley) Dodgers nickname in 1933. And even despite the ubiquity of official nicknames in the modern version of the game, there are still unofficial ones used with considerable frequency — as in the instance of the Pittsburgh Pirates, for instance, known popularly as the Buccos; the Los Angeles Angels, known as the Halos; or the San Diego Padres, known as the Friars.

This post is designed to serve as an appeal to readers to supply those commonly used nicknames (like Buccos and Friars and Halos) which are distinct from the official one used by the club itself. Readers are invited to err on the side of the obvious. (So, even suggesting the O’s for the Baltimore Orioles is still of some benefit.)

With a reasonably complete list assembled, writer/grapher/researcher Sean Dolinar will attempt to discover which of these unofficial nicknames is currently in greatest use among fans and journalists. The results, one supposes, will be useless and fascinating.