Hellas Football

  Arsenal vs Olympiakos:  UEFA Champions League Matchday Two preview By Stephen Kountourou UEFA Champions League League Phase Matchday Two Kick-off Time: 22:00 Greek Time Venue: Emirates Stadium, London Where to Watch: Cosmote Sport 2 HD Some things in life are guaranteed. Death, taxes and Olympiakos drawing Premier League side Arsenal in Europe.  Over the last 15 years, Thrylos have had many memorable matches against the Gunners. Mitroglou’s curling effort in Karaiskaki, the first ever win away against a Premier League side, Giroud's hat-trick, and of course the last-minute winner from Yuessef El Arabi, just to name a few.   Both sides currently have an even win-to-loss record against each other at the time of writing. But due to the format change from the group stages to the league phase, where two teams only play each other once before the knockout stages, that record, unless the full-time result is a draw, could very likely come to an end. After a disappoint...

 Olympiakos vs Pafos FC:  UEFA Champions League Matchday One preview By Stephen Kountourou UEFA Champions League League Phase Matchday One Kick-off Time: 19:45 Greek Time Venue: Georgios Karaiskakis Stadium, Piraeus Where to Watch: Cosmote Sport 2 HD It's that time again. Every year, I wonder whether this will be the final season in which I preview the exploits of Olympiakos in European competition. Should I go on to bigger, better and more interesting topics? Well, it doesn't get much bigger than the UEFA Champions League.  For the first time since the 2020/21 season, Thrylos or any Greek team will be competing in Europe's elite continental tournament, and this was an opportunity I knew I had to write about.  It is also worth noting that Olympiakos became the first Greek side to qualify automatically for the Champions League in exactly ten years, as the club with the best individual coefficient of all the domestic champions involved in qualifying (the domestic champ...

 Greece 0-3 Denmark: These are the games you must win. By Alec McQuarrie At the very least, these are the games you must not lose. In years gone by, hope would replace expectation. But Greece are a different prospect these days and Piraeus expects. In Euro 2024 qualifying, a 1-0 home loss to the Dutch all but confirmed the Ethniki would be forced to circumnavigate via the play-offs, and we all know how that ended. But if Greece are a different prospect to their previous incarnations, Denmark are most certainly a different prospect to Belarus. The first thing to note is that Denmark are big, and I mean BIG. They could be the biggest gang of grocks you’ve ever laid eyes on. Aside from Mikkel Damsgaard - who at 1.8m isn’t exactly a hobbit mind you - every single one of them is 1.85m (6’1”) or above. For context, Greece had seven players in their starting line-up shorter than that. If it wasn’t already patently clear beforehand, this was going to be a physical battle. The second thing ...

Greece 5-1 Belarus: A clean slate By Alec McQuarrie These don’t come around that often. The last clean slate came against Gibraltar in March 2023, the start of a 10-match qualifying campaign that ultimately ended in heartbreak, in failure, in Tbilisi. But it started with a 3-0 win in the Algarve against a team from a rock hanging off the Iberian peninsula. Only three players survive from Greece’s last clean slate: Kostas Tsimikas, Konstantinos Mavropanos and captain Tasos Bakasetas. That alone should demonstrate just how far the Ethniki have come in the last two and a half years. Back then, Christos Tzolis was warming the Norwich bench in the Championship, Christos Zafeiris was Norwegian and Kostas Karetsas was playing for Belgium’s U16s a nd the 17-year-old is making it really, really hard for those of us who are desperately trying not to get ahead of ourselves. His mature, guided finish inside two and a half minutes was a statement: this is not the same Greece as two and a half ye...

 The biggest Greek football clubs outside of the Super League from every region By Stephen Kountourou                           Credit: Riccardo D'Agnese (Check out his maps that you can purchase online) How does one estimate how big a football club really is? Some estimate it by accolades, others by the age of a club, how long they have competed at the top level, how well supported they are worldwide, or how wealthy they are, with enough pulling power to attract the best players.  Ultimately, it remains a topic that has been and will continue to be heavily debated among football fans. Then there is me, a fence-sitter, who says it is a bit of everything mentioned above. There is little debate, however, about who the big boys of Greek football are. The traditional big four of Olympiakos, Panathinaikos, AEK, and PAOK have dominated Greek football, more or less, since its inception.  Among the teams currently c...

The ten biggest transfer fees for Greek players By Stephen Kountourou In a social media post a couple of years ago on X, formerly known as Twitter, a user by the name of @KingVasilopita posted a football meme template featuring Greek winger Christos Tzolis after his move to then-Premier League side Norwich City. The post in question is displayed below: Credit to @KingVasilopita While it is a satire of the varying prices at which players of different nationalities transfer between clubs, it does highlight the general opinion among Greek football supporters that our players, up till recently, have been undervalued in the market. Tzolis, for example, went for only €11.5 million including add-ons despite being one of the biggest talents at PAOK and in the Greek Super League at the time. Over the last 12 months, however, the market's landscape has undergone significant changes. All of a sudden, Greek players are not only being linked with moves to teams from Europe's top five leag...