Know Your Enemy: Burnley
Burnley FC
Nickname: The Clarets (for their team colors Claret & Blue)
Founded: 1882
Home Stadium: Turf Moor
Capacity: 21,944
Manager: Former Bournemouth Great Scott Parker
Main Rival: Blackburn Rovers
Trophies: First Division Winners: 1920, 1960; FA Cup: 1914; FA Charity Shield: 1960, 1973
Last Won The Premier League (or 1st Division) In: 1960
Basic History: Founded in 1882, Burnley were one of the first fully-professional teams in England in 1883, and were one of the original founding members of the Football League in 1888. Up and down over the next 25 years (including in 1900 when their goalkeeper got banned for a year for trying to bribe Nottingham Forest on the last day of the season), they won the FA Cup over Liverpool in 1914 and won the First Division in 1920.
The Post-WW2 Burnley were one of the more progressive clubs in England (as far as soccer goes) by building the first training ground for players and investing in scouting and their youth academy. It paid off with a First Division title in the 1959-1960 season, but the abolition of the maximum wage the following year hurt smaller clubs like Burnley. They were fine for the rest of the 1960s, but financial reality set in by the 1970s leading to the nadir of Burnley football. In 1975 they suffered one of the greatest upsets in FA Cup history with a 1-0 loss to semi-professional Wimbledon. An attendance drop and larger debt led to the sale of prominent players and Burnley dropped out of the First Division, and then to the Third Division by the end of the 1979-1980 season. The Fourth Division came calling by 1985 and they barely managed, thanks to a last-day reprieve, to avoid dropping out of the Football League entirely, in 1987.
When Burnley won the Fourth Division in 1992 they became the first English team to win all four divisions in associated football, which is nice. Burnley was finally promoted back to the First Division, now known as the Premier League, in 2009, and were up and down over the better part of the next decade. A 7th place finish in 2018 took Burnley to Europe for the first time in 51 years and in 2022 the hiring of Manchester City legend Vincent Kompany as manager, but they were relegated at the end of 2023, and Kompany pissed off to Bayern Munich.
With Scott Parker at the helm in the 2024-25 season, Burnley set a record for allowing just 16 goals in 46 matches, and became the first team in English football history to win 100 points in a season but not win the title (ALAW).
Weird closing side note: During World War I, Lancashire soldiers stationed in Normandy would drink the local herbal liqueur Bénédictine with hot water to stay warm in the trenches. They brought the liqueur back to Burnley with them, and Turf Moor is the only soccer stadium in the world to sell the “Béné & Hot.” They sell over 30 bottles cnnof Bénédictine, making Burnley FC one of the world’s largest sellers of Bénédictine.
2024-25 Finish: 2nd in the Championship, Automatically Promoted to the Premier League
Famous Fans: King Charles III, Snoop Dogg, minority-owner JJ Watt.