Welcome

By: Minas | October 5th, 2009

Hello everyone, welcome to the Panathinaikos blog of The Offside.

My name is Minas, I am 17 years old, and I live in Crete,Greece. I am a big fan of sports (especially football & basketball), and the team I support is Panathinaikos. Other teams that I am fan of, or I just like, are Sevilla,Chelsea, Schalke & Porto.

This is my second blog (I had another one about a year ago, it’s deleted now) so I can’t say that I am very experienced.

Anyway, enough about myself. As you can see, this is a blog about Panathinaikos, a club located in Athens. Panathinaikos is the only Greek team that has managed to reach a European competition final (Champions League, 1971 , Ajax vs Panathinaikos 2-0), and generally Panathinaikos is the most successful Greek team in European competitions. In Greek competitions, fierce rivals Olympiakos are the most successful team (37 times league winners). In the last 13 years, Panathinaikos have won only one time the Greek Superleague (2003/04 season), and one time the Greek Cup (2003/04 season).

On 22 April, main shareholder Giannis Vardinogiannis gave a press conference in which he announced the decision of his family to reduce their share in the club to 50%, after 30 years of full ownership, through a €80 million increase of the company’s capital stock.After the negotiations and the share capital increase, Vardinogiannis family would hold 56% of the club, Amateur Panathinaikos 10% and the rest shareholders 34%. This happened due to the club’s crisis (as mentioned before, we’ve won only one league in 13 years). Things have changed a lot after that.

Some great players signed for the club (Gilberto Silva, Djibril Cisse), the club’s budget is much much bigger now ( this season’s budget was twenty million euros, while 3-4 years ago it was about two million euros), and generally Panathinaikos is much more better team, than some years ago. Our coach is Henk ten Cate.

In this season, we have won five games in five fixtures in Greek Superleague, but in Champions League unfortunately Atletico defeated us, so we continue in Europa League. Our group consists of Galatasaray,Dinamo Bucharest and Sturm Graz.

Anyway, that’s enough I guess. If you want to ask something about Panathinaikos, feel free to do it.

Τα λέμε. (”See ya”, in greek.)