It was hard to tell what was more disconcerting: the abrupt sign warning that firearms were banned or the eerie emptiness that enveloped the ground. Although piercing sunshine blazed all around, an uneasy chill could be felt at the disrepair and neglect surrounding what must have been the main entrance of the ground. Ticket office windows were smashed, rusting roller shutters were clinging to their fittings and the souvenir shop had clearly not been opened in some time.

Just finding the stadium had been a challenge. Stepping off the bus in the deserted main square, there wasn’t the slightest sign of life, never mind a sign to the home of the local football club. Despite the glorious golden summer drenching the whitewashed church and cobbled pavement, not a soul breathed and not a leaf stirred. A small cluster of plastic tables lay unoccupied outside the only bar in sight as a lone tractor grumbled and rumbled on down the hill, seemingly intent on leaving the sleepy vacuum behind.

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After stumbling through the desolate lanes and vast, unkempt fields, a spindly floodlight almost sheepishly edged into view, as if embarrassed to give away the location, and eventually we were welcomed by the sad spectre of decay. Still not one person had crossed our path. So, with nothing to stop us, we slipped through the gate and were greeted by a rudimentary concrete terrace and an immaculately maintained playing surface.

As we made our way to the main stand, it was clear that renovation was not a word in common usage in these parts. The wooden floorboards and multi-coloured seats would have been charmingly delightful in their day, but the peeling paintwork and moss-ridden steps – rotating pitch sprinklers covered the first few rows, and it appeared nobody had thought, or bothered, to move them – gave a depressing air of decline.

And yet it was here, in a tiny village an hour or two from Prague in the heart of the hops-growing countryside, that one of the most spectacularly bizarre experiments in football had come within a whisker of taking on Europe’s finest. This is a story of madness and brilliance but also, sadly, of ambition and folly.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The old turnstiles still stand but the club is no more. Photograph: Andrew Flint

Just before the turn of the century, a remarkable record was broken. When the local football club were promoted to the Gambrinus Liga, Blsany became the smallest European settlement to host a top-flight team; the hamlet itself had a population of 389 in 2000, with nearby villages barely pushing the fanbase into four figures.

Through the incredible vision – or sheer lunacy – of local businessman and former Chmel Blsany goalkeeper Frantisek Chvalovsky, a mind-boggling complex of seven training pitches, tennis courts, a rehabilitation centre and hotel was built to attract the world’s finest clubs to train during the summer, while the playing squad was invested in heavily as they shot up through the league system.

Incredibly, it worked. In 1998, the club reached the promised land of the first division under the management of Miroslav Beranek. They even flirted with Europe, reaching the semi-finals of the Intertoto Cup in 2000 and 2001, when they lost out to Udinese and then Brescia. An 18-year-old Petr Cech was in goal for the first of those cup runs and Jiri Nemec, Daniel Kolar and Jan Simak also donned their blue and yellow. Five of the Czech Republic team that won the Under-21 Euros in 2000 played for the club at some stage.

Fast forward to the present day and not only is there no top-flight football at the club – there is no club at all. The club were denied a licence for the fifth tier for the 2016-17 season due to a severe lack of funds and a near-empty senior playing squad. So, after going toe-to-toe with the heavyweights of Czech football, Chmel Blsany folded and slipped almost unnoticed out of existence.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The last sign of top-flight football. Photograph: Andrew Flint

When I visited the club before the start of their final season to meet the then-president Radek Pospisil, the signs were already there. Hope was fading fast. After wandering around the pitch, past the moulding subs bench – which still had a fading Gambrinus Liga sticker clinging on to the perspex, the last memory the top-flight glory days – and under the rickety wooden TV mast, the clubhouse came into view. A solid, varnished club crest was carved into the doorway, but still there was no sign of life, so we continued. Behind the main stand lies the modern accommodation complex, where Pospisil cheerfully greeted us in the reception alongside an impressive collection of shirts hanging on display.

“Those are from all the teams that have visited us,” he explained, as his eyes wandered over to a large gaggle of kids noisily wolfing down spaghetti bolognese sitting behind us in the canteen. They were all on a residential training camp. The hotel – specifically geared towards football teams – could hold 60 people and contained conference facilities and a sports injury spa centre, but felt so completely out of place alongside the crumbling stadium and charming but tiny village.

As we walked through to the clubhouse, the atmosphere changed. A model of the entire complex lay broken in a display cabinet underneath a clutter of different objects that were clearly unwanted or unused, while rolls of carpet and artificial turf were piled up in the next room. Pennants from illustrious visitors who had flocked to the village hung around the room, with team photos from Blsany’s days at the top table adorning what spaces were left on the walls.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The facilities that once attracted Bayern Munich, Marseille and Everton. Photograph: Andrew Flint

The nearest reasonably sized town is Zatec, home to some breweries of international renown. Blsany itself is right in the heartland of the hops-growing country, with metres-high crops grown to help fuel the burgeoning Czech beer industry. Even the name of the club is taken directly from this heritage; “Chmel” translates into “hops”. There is a Czech saying – “nejlepší nápady v Česku vznikají v hospodách” – that translates roughly as “the best ideas in the Czech Republic are made in pubs”. It is entirely appropriate, then, that Chmel Bleany was born over a pint or two.

The club was formed a few months after the conclusion of the second world war when nine men sitting around a table in the U Kovare pub decided they needed a club to represent their village. After raising 2,700 koruna (about €3,000) between them, yellow shirts and blue shorts and socks were bought and Otto Heinz was made the first president. For most of their history, the club was little more than a village side treading water in the lower reaches of the regional football system. Then, 20 years in, the most significant protagonist in their history entered the story.

Chvalovsky started out as their youth team goalkeeper before graduating to the first team and then eventually becoming the club’s owner. He played for a quarter of a century before hanging up his gloves in 1993 and setting about cementing his position in Czech industry and football. Chvalovsky was appointed chairman of the Czech football association in 1991, while still in the Blsany team, and he oversaw a meteoric rise in the national side, which peaked when they reached the Euro 96 final at Wembley.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A fan salutes the team in 2005. Photograph: Michal Cizek/AFP/Getty Images

Chvalovsky’s prowess as an administrator was seemingly beyond compare. His business interests, meanwhile, produced a turnover of more than €100m and he kept backing the club. “Of course, from the very beginning we were planning to try and spend at least one year in the top flight,” he said. “We had no idea how costly an experience it would turn out to be. In the end, one year became eight years. Especially the years after the Bosman case and after the collapse of my business group, were difficult, though.”

The club always relied on selling youngsters to raise funds. Vaclav Drobny joined Strasbourg in 2002 for €1m; Jan Simak’s transfer to Hannover in 2000 brought in €1.25m; and Cech earned the club €735,000 when he moved to Sparta Prague in 2001 and another €500,000 in sell-on fees upon his subsequent move to Rennes.

Another player who made his way through the club was Chvalovsky’s son, Ales, also a goalkeeper. On the surface, accusations of nepotism and seem reasonable, but the young Chvalovsky had trials at Liverpool and was in goal for the national side when they lost to Italy in the final of the Under-21 Euros in 2000. There was little Chvalovsky could do to save his team that night, when two goals from Andrea Pirlo – a free-kick and a penalty – were enough to give Italy victory. Czech Republic made amends at the next Under-21 European Championship, in 2002, when they beat France in the final. Chvalovsky was on the bench for that tournament, with his former team-mate Cech taking over as No1 keeper and winning the player of the tournament award.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The 4,000-capacity stadium that was built for a village of 389 people. Photograph: Andrew Flint

The manager associated with Blsany’s golden era, Miroslav Beranek, arrived at the club in 1996, when they were still trying to escape the second division. Beranek had been sacked by Slavia Prague the season before for finishing second in the league with a team that contained Patrik Berger and Vladimir Smicer. But, within two years at Blsany, Beranek had won the second division title and lifted the club into the top flight.

With Blsany now competing at the top table and the 4,000-capacity Mestsky Stadium welcoming thousands of fans from the big Prague clubs, Chvalovsky decided to invest €3.6m in the ambitious hotel complex. A whole host of European clubs, such as Bayern Munich, Marseille and Everton, came to town for their summer training sessions, using the medical facilities and peaceful countryside, as well as bringing in welcome revenue.

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However, the very man who dragged the club from obscurity into the limelight was central to its downfall. Chvalovsky had always been a controversial figure – he was kidnapped (he says by the mafia) in 1995 while on his way to a friendly against Norway – and there were always suspicions behind his business deals and various conflicts of interests. Some say his brushes with the law turned away what few fans were there in the first place.



Chvalovsky was at the airport in Prague on his way to a friendly against Macedonia in 2001 when he was arrested for fraud. He was fired from his post with the Czech football association and, after a decade of tortuous legal wrangling, he was sentenced to a decade in prison, with his assets and property seized by the state. The verdict was overturned on appeal, but his companies had been struggling for years and Chmel Blsany were slowly feeling the effects.

With money drying up, the club began their inevitable slide into lower league oblivion. When the decline came, it was sharp. They suffered four relegations in four seasons, going from the top flight in 2005-06 to the fifth tier in 2009-10. Players left, new talent became harder to attract and the club had to bring in free agents just to make up their numbers.

Investment from Horst Siegl – the all-time top goalscorer in the Czech League – couldn’t resurrect the fortunes of the hotel complex. As his interest waned, he spent less and less time in the country and eventually abandoned the project. The club continued to bleed players, staff and money, until last summer they simply couldn’t carry on any longer. On 26 August 2016, the club made an announcement – “beautifully timed in our seventieth anniversary” – that the game was up for good.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The team in 2005, before they went on their run of four straight relegations. Photograph: Michal Cizek/AFP/Getty Images

Chvalovsky now lives abroad and is reluctant to court publicity, having retired from life in football following the demise of the club he first joined half a century ago. His memories have not been completely soured, however. “I’ve witnessed something no one has ever done on the Czech footballing scene and perhaps even in the whole world,” he said. “We began by ascending from the district championship [the eighth tier] in 1973 and 20 years later, we earned promotion to the second division. I experienced all of those as an active player.”

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Such an inexorable rise naturally drew increasingly suspicious glances the further they rose up the system, not to mention the obvious influence Chvalovsky held in the corridors of power, but he maintains their fairytale was rooted in a reality of honest, hard work. “We’ve never just purchased the licence for a higher division; it was all about sporting success.”

You might think his personal highlights were the miraculous first foray into Europe or welcoming Sparta Prague to their humble stadium, but you’d be wrong. “Just recently on a holiday, I was showing to my grandson a videotape of the games from spring 2004,” he reminisced. “After the first part of the season, Blsany were dead last with a poor two wins from 16 games, yet they managed to survive. Pretty much every spring game was a blast. Great memories.” Memories are all that now remain of the most dramatic village club.

• This article is from These Football Times

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