Brondby IF - One of the most succefull Teams in Denmark

Down memory lane ....

While soccer in Scandinavian turned from amateur to semi-professional in Sweden in the late 70's with great result in Europe by Malmö FF reaching the Champions Cup final in 1978/79 and later also IFK Göteborg that won the UEFA Cup final in 1981/82, Brøndby IF were the first Scandinavian side to turn full-time professional, not surprisingly in 1986 in the slipstream of the success by the Danish National Team, that had also gone from being for amateurs only and did not even have a full-time professional coach until 1979.

In 1986/87 semi-professional IFK Göteborg reached yet another big triumph, beating the Scottish side Dundee United in the UEFA cup final, while a now full-time professional Brøndby team reached the Champions Cup quarter-finals that very same year.

The very next season, the semi-professional UEFA Cup Champions IFK Göteborg and Brøndby IF faced each other in the very first round of the UEFA Cup and the full-time professional Brøndby IF team now showed to be the stronger side and won the tie (2-1 & 0-0). though IFK Göteborg were not quite finished as a top Scandinavian team in Europe, since they also reached the the CL quarter-finals in 1994/95, but the late 80's to early 90's mainly belonged to a Brøndby IF team that produced their best result in 1990/91 when they were only 5 minutes from reaching the UEFA Cup final, but narrowly lost the away leg to AS Roma by 1-2.

In 1990, Brøndby had hired former national team captain Morten Olsen as manager, and they were now fielding several players who would go on to win the Euro-92 for Denmark, like Schmeichel and 2nd keeper Mogens Krogh, Lars Olsen, Kim Vilfort, John "Faxe" Jensen, Kim Christofte (who scored the decisive penalty in the Semi-Finals against The Netherlands) and Bent Christensen. On their way to the UEFA cup semi-finals, Brøndby IF had trashed the solid German sides Eintracht Frankfurt 5-0 (which still stand as Frankfurt's biggest defeat ever in the Europa Cup's) and Bayer Leverkusen (3-0) as you can see in the highlights just below :

Brøndby v Eintracht Frankfurt



Brøndby v Bayer Leverkusen




Among other big results, Brøndby eliminated English giants Liverpool in the 1995/96 UEFA cup, when Norwegian defender Dan Eggen secured the 1-0 victory on Anfield. But Brøndby were mainly known as the "German slayer" back then, with one of the more remarkable result being the 5-0 away trashing of Karlsruhe in 1996/97. Brøndby a bit surprisingly had lost the home leg by 1-3, more or less defeated by the excellent playing German international Thomas Hässler, who simply was a one-man army for Karlsruhe in that match. However, Hässler then got injured and was not able to play in the return leg in Germany and the rest is history, with Brøndby progressing to the UEFA cup Quarter-Finals

The 0-5 Karlsruhe loss to Brøndby still stands as one of the absolute biggest home defeats by any German side in the history of the Europa Cups !.

 

!995-96 Uefa Cup, 2nd Round, 2nd leg :

Liverpool v Brøndby IF, 0-1 (agg: 0-1)
0-1 Dan Eggen (79)
Attendance: 35,878

Lineups, notes and related articles :
https://www.lfchistory.net/SeasonArchive/Game/2033

Highlights :

 

How is the Red Bull case going for Brøndby ?

 

It was dropped, but the $14.5 million Brøndby deficit this year has (as usual) otherwise been covered by investors also adding around $4 million extra, but fact is that unlike the other Danish top club, Brøndby have been forced to sell 3 of their best players this winter to do some damage control and reduce their wage budget