Best Sports Rivals
 

With so many great rivals in the global sporting world, what would you rank as your top ten best sport rivalaries. The list includes all rivals in the world, regardless of sport, and can include international rivals (USA-Canada, Football ect.-example). I believe that a great rival needs to consist of a few things: 1) It needs to have a history of passion and "hate" towards each other, 2) A history and potential of battling over trophies, promotion/playoff/qualiflying sports, ect. 3) A rival needs to capture that sports attention through the entire fanbase of that sport (for example-the Subway Series in my view doesn't capture the baseball fanbase outside of NY).

USA-Russia: Cold War

1. Definitely some hate there...have you seen Rocky IV or Rambo II?
2. History of battling over Third World Countries
3. Captured the attention of the world.

Scooby Doo-Yogi Bear-Rottens: Laff-a-lympics

1. Definitely some hate as well, Hanna Barbara took all of the cartoons and put them against each other and their bad guys
2. History of battling over the girl, treasure, Grape Ape, and the trophy at the end of each episode.
3. Pretty much all of the important cartoons were there.

Off the top of my head

Leafs/Senators
Leafs/Habs
Canada/Russia hockey
Canada/USA- anything we are good enough to compete with them
Indiana/Kentucky NCAA basketball
Yankees/Red Sox
USA/world- at anything the USA is favoured to win
Oilers/Flames

My first thought would be Michigan/Ohio State

Coke and Pepsi.

Well here are the ones as far as I'm concerned. :)

OU/Texas
Cowboys/Redskins
Cubs/Cardinals

Just ones that pop into my head

NCAA basketball Indiana-Kentucky I live in the middle of it, it's all that matters in the world the week leading up to it
NCAA football Michigan-Ohio St.
NFL Packers-Bears
Premiership Aresenal-Man U I'm living over here this summer, just amazes me how every small sports shop has a shirt for one, if not both, of these clubs. Chelsea's gaining, but still has a way to go.

I think this is an unfortunate qualification. Off the top of my head, I can't really think of any rivalry that can meet this.

Yankees / Red Sox is a great rivalry but does it capture the baseball fanbase outside of NY and Boston? Not really.

Hockey rivalries:

Leafs/Habs
Leafs/Wings
Wings/Avs
Oilers/Flames
Habs/Bruins
USA/Canda
USA/USSR

And the best of all time... Canada/USSR.

Water and Gatorade

EASY!

Hartford vs. West Virginia in the Imperial Football League. Two seasons, two West Virginia division titles, Harford has finished a total of 1-1/2 games behind WVa over that time frame and has a 3-2 record against them including playoff games (2-2 in regular season games). To make things even more exciting, as of last year both teams were in the top 4/5 in the IFL for winning percentage.

Yanks/Sox

The last 2 playoffs series between the 2 has been must see TV baseball.. That doesn't happen every year but it will if the Yanks and Sox hook up again.

Sorry, cannot be a "biggest" rivalry when neither team considers the other its biggest rival.

University of Minnesota/University of Wisconsin

Minneapolis/St. Paul and Madison both get really geared up for the Paul Bunyan game in football every fall and the hatred on both sides for the other is as bad as Bears-Packers.

Interesting though that the rivalry doesn't carry over to the Vikings-Packers axis, maybe because Packers-Bears is so firmly entrenched.

Really? I don't know about Texas, but you tell me who OU would consider their biggest rivals if not Texas. OSU? Nope. Until recently, OSU hasn't put up much of a fight. Nebraska? Maybe in the 80's, but not anymore. In the current Big 12, Texas is definitely OU's biggest rival.

Dutch soccer: Ajax-Feyenoord
The Classic. The True Classic. Rivalry at it's best and worst. People all over the country teasing their best friends because they root for the otherside from the week before the game until weeks or monthst after the game. The only thing missing in this rivalry is a the Holland vs. the rest of the country element (read: the reigning west versus the north, east, south) as both teams are from Holland. The center of the rivalry is the centuries old rivalry between Amsterdam (Ajax' city) and Rotterdam (Feyenoord's city) to become the world's leading harbour. The one thing that captures the essence of the rivalry the best is probably a random conversation between 8 to 10yo boys who meet for the first time. The bully of the two will ask: "Ajax or Feyenoord?" and giving the wrong answer can give you some serious problems. It's almost like Bush's "with us or against us" and the "I don't like soccer" answer is not an option. The lowlight of the rivalry was an arranged battle (yes, battle) between the core of the supporters groups in the graslands of Beverwijk. The leader of the Ajax group was killed in a fashion you usually only see in '70s musicals about gangs in the USA. Thank the higher powers of life he was the only victim that day.

For those that said Oilers/Flames, I think you have to extend the rivalry to simply Edmonton/Calgary. Anytime those two match up (no matter the sport or competition), especially in CFL and NHL, the hate and passion is there.

In soccer :

Manchester Utd - Manchester City
Manchester Utd - Arsenal
Liverpool - Everton
Arsenal - Tottenham
Chelsea - Arsenal

Ajax - Feyenoord

Inter - AC Milan
AS Roma - Lazio
Lazio - Juve

Marseille - PSG

Real Madrid - Barca
Real Madrid - Atletico Madrid
Real Sociedad - Athletic Bilbao

Porto - Benfica

Olympiakos - Panathinaikos

Galatasaray - Fenerbache

Pretty cool. On the international front, sounds like Holland-Germany and Brazil-Argentina are top rivals.

I gotta say michigan and ohio state just because I lived on the border

Celtic - Rangers tops most of these imo.


In American football, Browns - Steelers is a favorite of mine.

UNC-Duke basketball (why else would I be in this thread?)

but while i'm here:

Army/Navy
Auburn/Alabama
Georgia/Georgia Tech
Georgia/Florida

If they could both stop sucking for a little while, Cowboys/Redskins could be good again. For now though, all I can think about when I think Cowboys/Redskins is Dennis Miller's Prevent Offense comment in that horrible,horrible MNF game.

49ers/Cowboys was the greatest rivalry of the 90's....football-wise, anyway. I have never hated a team or it's fans more than the Cowboys.

Duke/UNC

Celtic-Rangers is pure hate...

India-Pakistan in cricket is pretty unmatched.

Celtics - Rangers?

Paul Pierce can't even skate.

Or hit a fastball.

On a broader scale:

MLB-Yankees/Red Sox
NFL-Raiders/Chiefs
NBA-Lakers/Celtics

Locally:

College football-Ohio State/Michigan
College basketball-Cincinnati/Xavier
NFL-Bengals/Browns, to a lesser extent Bengals/Steelers and also Bengals/Ravens (old Browns)

Kareem is not walking through that door. James Worthy is not walking through that door.

dude, Yankees-Red Sox have nothing on about 10 of those sporting rivalries mentioned. American, yes- international, no doubt.

D00d. Kwame Brown vs. Kendrick Perkins is the matchup we have all been waiting for.

I am going to believe you made a mistake in this sentence and unintentionally put "no doubt", instead of "no", otherwise you are contradicting yourself.

I'm American. I am listing the rivalries that have an influence on me. Anything international doesn't, sorry.

penis vs. vagina


global interest in that one

Celtic - Rangers is local derby and is in a joke of a soccer league, they play that game 7 times a season. Still, that game is dreaded in hatred and sipped in a juice of religous sentiments more than any other soccer game and people in Northern Ireland made that game a symbol of their civil war, despite the fact that Celtic and Rangers are Scottish.

Forget soccer, forget baseball, forget college football; we got a winner here.

Oh yeah.