FEB 22 — Never mind the Champions League, the most intensely contested and passionately supported sporting action I witnessed in Europe this week came on Thursday night in Athens, where local giants Panathinaikos and Olympiacos went head to head on Greek soil in basketball’s Euroleague for the first time in more than a decade.

Make no mistake, this game was a big deal in Greece, where basketball comes very close to rivalling football as the national sport and these two teams are particularly dominant, with Olympiacos the reigning European champions while Panathinaikos were their immediate predecessors.

It was also a significant encounter in terms of the current campaign, with the teams jostling for a place in the play-offs as the current Top 16 phase of the tournament reaches its midway point.

When you also throw into the mix the added ingredient of more than 17,000 supporters inside the sold-out Olympic Arena (OAKA), everything was set up for a high-octane encounter with expectations of an electric atmosphere bordering on riotous evidenced by the presence of a huge net between the stands and the court to prevent over-excited fans from throwing objects onto the court.

As I watched the final stages, with home side Panathinaikos removing the potential for public disorder by edging towards a tense, narrow victory, one thought flashed through my mind: why do the fans of these two teams hate each other so much?

I’m no expert in Greek social politics, but on the face of it these fans have far more in common than differences. They are near neighbours, with Panathinaikos based in Athens and Olympiacos coming from the nearby port city of Piraeus; they share a love of basketball, with many of them also following the clubs’ respective football teams; and above all, they are all Greek – which in the current economic climate should encourage a solidarity of feeling rather than great enmity.

When Greek sides play against Turkish teams, it’s obvious there will be mutual resentment considering the fraught historical relationship between the two countries. But Greek sides against each other? Why can’t they all just get along?

Hah. As if.

Apparently, the main source of the rivalry is historic and class-based, with Panathinaikos representing the higher society of the capital city while Olympiacos traditionally attracted a more working-class fan base.

This relationship is mirrored, of course, by many other similarly fraught sporting rivalries all over the world. Some contain obvious political and cultural connotations: in Scotland, for example, Celtic are the Catholics and Rangers are the Protestants, and in Spain, Real Madrid represent the wider Spanish state while Barcelona are the team for Catalan separatists.

Tensions cannot always be so easily explained, however, with the rabid hatred that exists between Southampton and Portsmouth in the gently affluent maritime southern English county of Hampshire providing one good example of a passionately maintained local rivalry that escapes easy definition.

Many other antipathies persist despite the original differences between the two clubs being heavily eroded by social changes over the course of time.

For example, arguably the world’s most bitter and unforgiving relationship between two sporting clubs is the ongoing seething hatred that exists between Liverpool and Manchester United, which relentlessly crosses the border from rational dislike of a rival into non-stop mutual ill-feeling.

Originally, there were clear reasons for distrust and enmity between fans of the two clubs, who are separated by a distance of just 27 miles in the north-west of England.

Both cities grew rapidly during the early days of the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s, with Liverpool fuelled by its docks and transport links while Manchester quickly became the world’s largest producer of cotton.

There was also a sudden and enormous influx of outsiders to swell the populations, with Liverpool attracting tens of thousands of immigrants from Ireland, and Manchester’s growth acting as a magnet for workers from other parts of the UK.

So although the modern guises of both cities – fully formed by the time their respective football teams were founded – were effectively creations of the Industrial Revolution and were therefore similarly dominated by the downtrodden blue-collar working-classes, they were also essentially different: crudely put, Liverpool was the city of Irish dockers, while Manchester was the home of British millers.

Nowadays, however, those past identities have effectively vanished: the “dark satanic mills” have disappeared from Manchester, and Liverpool’s docks are chiefly a tourist curiosity or the setting for new waterfront apartment complexes.

I suspect it’s similar in Athens and Piraeus, with the structures of modern post-Industrial society largely eliminating the former inherent differences between aristocratic city centres and working class suburbs.

Nowadays, indeed, perhaps the ‘rivalry’ that most reflects our everyday lives is the one between China and Bangladesh, with the former manufacturing our electric goods while the latter supplies our clothing.

However much the basis for our sporting rivalries might have been eliminated, though, the antagonisms remain. Ask a Manchester United fan why he hates Liverpool even though they haven’t won the Premier League for more than 20 years, and he’ll probably mutter something about “dirty scousers” without being able to provide a more meaningful response – and he almost certainly won’t give you a discourse about the historic rivalry between millers and dockers.

And that’s because traditional sporting rivalries have now taken on a life of their own. Relationships have mutated into something entirely different from their original meanings, leaving the founding factors behind and developing into a new, irrational, barely understood yet still passionately felt phenomenon.

But ultimately, it’s all the same thing: a question of identity. Liverpool and Manchester United; Panathinaikos and Olympiacos; River Plate and Boca Juniors; Tottenham and Arsenal…there’s now no real reason for fans of these clubs to hate each other.

But they still do, for the same reasons as their ancestors: fans identify with their chosen teams, see themselves and their communities represented within them, and regard any threat to their team as a threat to their own self-worth – especially when that challenge comes from the other side of the fence, which could so easily be their own side of the fence in ever so slightly different circumstances.

For that reason, people who really should like each other will continue to despise each other; and for that reason, anyone who dismisses professional sport as “only a game” is completely missing the point.

*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.