The success stories are lined up, and Aalborg shows once again that it is Denmark’s biggest and best sports city. This applies regardless of whether you look at the top professional clubs or the smaller and often volunteer-run associations.
It is less than a year ago that the disappointment over AaB’s relegation from the Superliga in football and Aalborg Handball’s lost DM final took many of the headlines, but the city has fought back to that extent.
Aalborg Handball and Aalborg Pirates superbly won the regular season in their sports and are favorites to win DM gold.
AaB is on its way back to the Superliga with leaps and bounds, EH Aalborg’s handball women have secured promotion to the league, and this week the badminton club Aalborg Triton took a place in the country’s top tier for the first time in 24 years.
The results make Copenhagen, Aarhus and Odense blush with envy, because they cannot boast of having as many teams in the top tier across so many sports.
Unfortunately, the capital of North Jutland is no bigger than that the current success creates a bottleneck problem that can be felt all the way down the food chain. There simply aren’t enough sponsorship dollars in the city for everyone to get the piece of cake they dream of.
Aalborg Handball, AaB and Aalborg Pirates can all gather at least 5,000 spectators on good days, and therefore with good reason they run with most headlines and sponsorship crowns.
The tough battle at the top is also part of the explanation for AaB currently lagging behind in terms of commercial income, because Aalborg Handball has a tailwind to that extent and is stealing part of the market that the football club previously had for itself.
What remains is the handball club EH Aalborg, the badminton club Triton Aalborg, AaB’s women’s soccer team and a sea of smaller sports that have difficulty breaking through and have to live off the crumbs that are left when the big players have eaten up.
It is all the more impressive that those clubs have still managed to get through to the top, because it has required extremely hard and often voluntary work behind the scenes.
As media, we are naturally also forced to follow that pecking order, even if we are often shot in the shoes that we do not give the publicity that the smaller clubs “deserve”.
Leaving Aalborg Handball and AaB aside, the truth is that there are very few readers for the traditional match coverage that once drove sports journalism. Today, we can measure this very precisely, and we simply have to act accordingly.
Fortunately, there are still readers for the good human stories that lie around the smaller clubs. We will continue to take pride in finding and telling about them.
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Huge cheers: Now the people of Aalborg can finally wear a proper feather
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North Jutland once again has a team in the women’s top division
2024-03-27 04:55:40
#Aalborg #drowning #sporting #success