Know Your Minnows: Cork City FC

By: Ian Rose | June 26th, 2007

Cork City FC
Welcome to the first installment of “Know Your Minnows”. As the Intertoto Cup and UEFA Cup progress through their rounds, I will be highlighting a few of the competing teams and talking a little about their history and their prospects in this year’s tournaments.

Cork City Football Club is a relative newcomer in Irish football. Although there’s been football in Cork since the 1930s, the current club was only founded in 1984. In that time, they have had some impressive seasons, both domestically and in Europe. They have been champions of Ireland twice, in 1993 and 2005, setting the record for league points (74) in the latter. Both of these championships led to first-round entries in the Champions League. In both years, they won their first-round matches, only to lose in the second. In fact, Cork City has competed in one of the European tournaments (CL, UEFA Cup, Intertoto Cup or Cup Winner’s Cup [RIP]) in 13 of its 23 years. Their most impressive season in Europe was probably 2005-2006, when City progressed through three rounds in the UEFA Cup, eventually losing just short of the group stage to Slavia Praha from the Czech Republic.

This season, Cork City finds themselves in their 4th Intertoto Cup campaign. They’ve started strong with a 2-0 away win at Valur of Iceland, and if they progress through this round, they enter the only one of the 14 second-round ties without a seeded opponent. They’ll face either Hammarby of Sweden or Ki Klaksvik of the Faroe Islands. If they can take advantage of that relatively friendly assignment, they’ll face FC Utrecht from the Dutch Eredivisie. Though City fell off of their impressive championship form this past season, they are still one of my favorite first round teams to make an impact this season, and I think they could very well make the UEFA Cup. They have one of the easier roads in front of them - Utrecht is a respectable team, but they are not Hamburg, Lens or Blackburn - and time will tell if they’ll be able to take advantage of it.

My prediction: Cork City will progress through the Intertoto Cup to the third round, but fall just short of beating Utrecht for the UEFA Cup spot.

Links: CCFC Official Website, Supporters Club