Followers of Czech football may perhaps wonder why a club from Prague features the silhouette of the iconic Australian kangaroo on their emblem. As you may well guess, there is an interesting story behind it. Back in 1927, the governing body of soccer in Australia tried to organise for a top-notch European team to come and tour the country. As a British colony, they wanted to put this most British of sports on display to the Australian public. They turned to the motherland FA, asking them to send a club over for the tour, but the FA refused, seeing no purpose in promoting the sport in such a footballing backwater. Many big-name European clubs were approached, but all of them gave the same answer as the English FA. Nobody wanted to make the lenghy journey by sea from Europe to the land down under.

 

The invitation eventually extended to Czechoslovakia. Only one team responded positively – a small club from the Czech capital called AFK Vrsovice. This came after rejections from the Czech national side and the great Sparta Prague. The Australian officials had the foresight of knowing that such an obscure club would be unlikely to draw significant crowds, so they rebranded AFK Vrsovice to “Bohemians”, which is the name of the region forming part of Czechoslovakia, for the purpose of the tour, and marketed them as a Czechoslovakian national team of sorts, hoping that the Australian public wouldn’t know the difference. To their credit, the tour ended up being highly successful.

 

Bohemians played three so-called “Test Matches” against the Australian national team, as well as games against various state and regional representative teams. They visited Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Newcastle and several regional centres. A love affair soon developed between them and Australian soccer fans. The Bohemian players loved Australia as much as Australia loved them, and it is said that when the tour ended and it was time for them to return to Czechoslovakia, many of them wanted to stay behind in Australia permanently rather than return to their homeland. As a parting gift, Australian representatives presented the Europeans with a pair of live wallabies (ever since being misinterpreted as kangaroos), which were taken back to Czechoslovakia with the club (and must have made the journey home interesting) and in turn safely handed over to the Prague Zoo. One of the wallabies can be viewed today, stuffed, in the Bohemians museum.

 

Vrsovice transformed their identity as a direct legacy of this tour, keeping the name Bohemians permanently, gaining the nickname “Klokani”, Czech for kangaroos, and having the marsupial, the enduring icon of the Australian outback, grace their club crest forever more. For the record, Bohemians won 15 games on their four month tour, drawing 2 and losing 3.  

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But, the story of the Bohemians doesn’t end there. In 2005, now called Bohemians 1905, the club sadly went bankrupt and was sent down to the third tier of the Czech football pyramid. Another club called FC Strizkov Praha 9 needed a new identity, fair enough with a name like that, and purchased the Bohemians brand, renaming themselves FC Bohemians Praha and hijacking the kangaroo icon as their own. Fans of the original club consider this team to be impostors. The loyal supporters of the original Bohemians poured their own money into the club which allowed them to make their way back up the divisions to the top flight of Czech football, where, for a time, they faced none other than Bohemians Praha aka the fake Bohemians. This meant that residents of Prague could amazingly watch a “Kangaroo Derby” in the capital of the Czech Republic, tens of thousands of miles from the Aussie outback.

 

The original Bohemians have tasted the ultimate poetic justice however. In 2010, the Prague City Court ruled that Bohemians Praha could no longer use the name Bohemians as they had no connection to the original club. They were then deducted 20 points and made to pay a large fine for throwing a tantrum in which they refused to play Bohemians 1905, and ended up relegated from the Czech First League. Later that year, they were refused a licence to play in the second league as they failed to pay their fine, thus being automatically relegated to the third league. They eventually found themselves languishing in the fifth division, and after losing the Bohemians naming rights, the owners of FC Bohemians Praha decided to disband the club, leaving the original Bohemians the exclusive rights to the kangaroo branding and name. Today, Bohemians 1905 remain in the top division of the Czech football league.