Collingwood Football Club

Collingwood Football Club, nicknamed The Magpies, is an Australian rules football club playing in the Australian Football League. The players wear black and white striped guernseys, similar to the colours of a magpie.

Collingwood has won 14 VFL/AFL premierships, second to Essendon and Carlton who are on 16. The club traditionally represented the working class inner Melbourne suburb of Collingwood, Victoria, however it has since moved its base to the Lexus Centre in Melbourne and its traditional suburban home ground Victoria Park to the much larger Melbourne Cricket Ground.

The Magpies are known for their passionate supporter base, particularly known as "The Magpie Army". Traditional Melbourne suburban rivalries Essendon^[1] and Richmond^[2] remain fierce, although the national league may have diluted this feeling somewhat^. The long held rivalry with Carlton, for example, has waned in recent years^.  Despite this, Collingwood has gained interstate rivals and has retained the reputation in the national competition as the "team everybody loves to hate" (except, that is, for the massive number of Collingwood supporters) - jealousy could be a factor in this.

The club was traditionally known in Melbourne as the "Catholic" club, possibly due to support in the 1920s from the wealthy businessman John Wren, and also due to the support of Irish descendants living in the Collingwood slums in the early years of the 20th century. This was even shown in an Australian version of a play by Adam Kreuzer, based on the film The Wanderers, where the Ducky Boys (The Irish Catholic gang) are all Collingwood Football Club supporters.

Historically Collingwood games attracted large attendances, which in recent times has become a source of pride for supporters who have been starved of true on-field success. In 1970, 121,696 spectators watched Carlton defeat Collingwood in the grand final, the record attendance for a football game of any code in Australia. Collingwood has the largest membership of the ten Victorian clubs.The average crowd at Collingwood home games in 2006 was 52,883.

The club's motto is "Floreat Pica", translated from Latin as "May the Magpies flourish".

Source: Wikipedia