Hellas Football

For decades now Greece has had talented youth players coming in and out in waves but with very few reaching anywhere close to their potential with several off them either getting lost in their careers through lack of development or just by simply making bad career decisions. Now with the financial crisis affecting Greek teams, along with the globalization of the sport with scouts finding talented youth players easily it seems there's a good chance more players won't get lost as much and could therefore finally add some depth to the Greek National Team (or Ethniki) which is sorely needed. Regardless, this season has shown there's plenty of talent on the way despite the many problems of the Greek Super League so here's a look at a first team of players this season that have made a name for themselves either in their league, within scouts/team/etc, or in the National Team. *In this list of players I left out already established first team U21 players like Donis ...

Friend of Hellas Football, Nick Gargano was lucky enough to watch our Ethniki Omada play live and has kindly shared his thoughts on the match from before kick off to full time.  THOUGHTS ON LINEUP AND ANTICIPATION FOR MATCH   The anticipation in the weeks leading up to this intriguing matchup against Saudi Arabia has felt much different feel than recent friendlies against Egypt and Switzerland.   In what should come as a relief for fans, Skibbe has finally ventured out of his comfort zone and selected an entirely different squad with all but one Super League player. It was interesting to see how a squad full of fresh faces fared up against a team gearing up for the World Cup.   That being said, Skibbe was still up to his usual bizarre tricks and once again called up Alexandros Tziolis. In some ways, Skibbe’s thought process is somewhat understandable as Tziolis is a veteran and regular for Al Fayha in the Saudi League who will undoubtedly underst...

The behaviour of PAOK and some of its supporters, as well as from its various social media channels recently, has at the very least been perplexing. As an avid follower of Greek Football for many years, I have always thought that Greek clubs have been slow to capitalise on this current “social media era”. PAOK to their credit, have been one of the few clubs to have “gotten it”, but the stuff coming out of the club in the last few weeks, has left a lot to be desired. Publicly claiming conspiracies, vendettas from Athens and searching for other boogeymen to lay the blame for their astonishing collapse. It’s all well and good for PAOK people to be upset, after all, it was their League Championship to lose and by all rights, it should be them celebrating their 3rd Greek League Title this weekend, instead we have all seen how the closing weeks of the season have played out for the club. But where should the finger of blame be pointed at? Whose fault is it that the club received p...

After a promising start where we qualified for the UCL group stages Olympiakos went ahead and stuffed it all up this year culminating with the club finishing trophy-less for the first time in many years. So where did it all go wrong? Lets start from the beginning, but before that. Congratulations to AEK Athens on winning the League. They have been the feel good story of the season and with a new stadium on the horizon, things are looking good for the club. Managers. The appointment of Besnik Hasi. Hasi was an odd choice but was brought in for his ability to navigate through the UCL qualification stages. A job he succeeded in but from the beginning of the season we never really looked like a comfortable team and our UCL performances where absolutely shocking albeit in a tough group but when our first opponent was Sporting Lisbon a team we should of fancied ourselves over at home and still went down 3-2 it was curtains and essentially we were out after our second game (a l...