The nastiest teams in sporting history according to our writers

Being seen as nasty can be a badge of honour. ‘No one likes us, we don’t care,’ is one of the refrains you hear from fans revelling in their status as the bad guys. Manchester City players protested the ‘dark arts’ employed by Arsenal as the north London club toiled to hold onto a slender lead at the weekend, which got Telegraph Sport wondering who the true masters of sporting niggle really are.

Here, our writers tell us who they think are the nastiest sports teams in history.

Atletico Madrid: 2011-present

Diego Simeone’s Atlético Madrid have become the go-to reference for any side engaging in the kind of ‘anti-football’ warfare which the puritans despise. Go against them and it is excruciating to suffer the time wasting, agitating and referee-baiting. And that’s just the coach.

At their most combative, it is like watching 10 outfield players performing like a more technically gifted Michael Brown (no apology if you’re reading Mr Brown. Those YouTube videos dedicated to your most notorious tackles means any side you played for also belong on this list). But for all that, when neutrals watch Atlético repel and infuriate a possession-based side, especially one of the world’s wealthiest clubs with an in-built superiority complex, they are drawn to one of the most captivating sights in football.

Atlético can win you over to such an extent you are celebrating every late tackle and joining in with those innocent pleas to the officials. Would you want to watch it every week? Of course not, but without Atlético and their imitators the sport would be predictable and boring. If you cannot win playing the beautiful game, there is nothing wrong with winning ugly.

South Africa: 2006-09

Their skulduggery may have been mitigated by the advent of virtual snitches (television match officials), which hastened the end of ‘self-policing’ in rugby union, but the Springboks of the late 2000s were as nasty as they were successful. And, winning the 2007 World Cup as well as a gripping British and Irish Lions series in 2009, they were pretty successful.

Bakkies Botha was their bully-in-chief, but a pack featuring mean henchmen such as Bismarck du Plessis, Danie Rossouw and a young Schalk Burger – how did he escape red for that eye gouge on Luke Fitzgerald? – was simply brutal. And you even had hard-as-nails backs such as Jaque Fourie.

Have a listen below to the story that skipper John Smit tells of Botha scrummaging against Durban-born England prop Matt Stevens. It is a doozy.

Surrey: 1950s and 60s

Nasty individuals – often fast bowlers – have always existed but Surrey were unquestionably the nastiest domestic team, starting in the 1930s then reaching the depths in the 1950s and 1960s.

The biggest indictment came from Sir Frank Worrell after the West Indian tourists played Surrey in 1957: “The unhappiest game in which I have ever played….the Surrey players kept up a constant stream of belly-aching… the objects were the West Indian batsmen and the umpires….we [Worrell and Clyde Walcott] were abused when the players were changing ends at the finish of each over… the incessant talking among the close-in fielders even went on while the bowler was running up… if we had behaved half as badly as Surrey we would have been dubbed as a lot of savages – and deservedly so.”

Overseas, Australia under Steve Waugh take the biscuit. In addition to the sledging designed to cause “mental disintegration”, their fielders threw the ball back at the batsman – the most cowardly form of bullying known on a cricket field.

Oakland Raiders: 1970s

Masters of ultraviolence in the sport of American football, which prizes it more than most, especially in its pre-enlightenment era. The nicknames of some of the Raiders’ key men tell a story: Jack “The Assassin” Tatum and Skip “Dr. Death” Thomas. All went in for big hits, violent assaults masquerading as tackles.

Tatum once hit New England Patriot receiver Darryl Stingley so hard with his shoulder he paralysed him. Stingley was not even the intended receiver on the play, and this was in a pre-season game.

After George Atkinson knocked Pittsburgh Steeler Lynn Swann unconscious with a forearm to the back of his helmet, Steelers head coach Chuck Noll called out the “criminal element” in the NFL. It was an uncompromising and horrible approach but it won them a Super Bowl under John Madden in 1977.

Leeds United: 1970s

Anyone suggesting that Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal are the nastiest team in football history has clearly only been following the game for the past fortnight. The very idea that they are close to matching sides such as Juventus’s team of the 1980s is laughable.

And there are examples closer to home, not least Don Revie’s Leeds United of the 1970s, a side which mixed sublime skill, tactical excellence and supreme coordination with cynical thuggery. Norman Hunter, Billy Bremner, Jack Charlton and the nastiest of the lot Johnny Giles, in tough times they were a team more than adept at getting their retaliation in early. The apex of their aggression was the 1970 FA Cup final.

Against a Chelsea team which relished the opportunity to match them kick for kick, punch for punch, they gave a masterclass in the darkest of dark arts.

Beziers: 1970s and 80s

Between 1970 and 1985, the only club worth getting excited about in the dark underworld of French rugby was Béziers. Across a 15-year period, the working town in south-west France claimed an astonishing 10 titles of the equivalent of the Top 14.

But any romantic notion of “French flair” can be nipped in the bud immediately. The Béziers side was brutish, beastly and bellicose. Their penchant for a punch-up was such that one of French rugby’s most iconic moments, which continues to be a source of much debate and mystery to this day, placed the side’s violence front and centre.

In the famous 1971 French final, Toulon captain André Herrero had to depart injured owing to a despicable act of foul play. Herrero was kicked, off the ball, with such force in his ribs that they cracked and he could not continue. The mystery surrounds the perpetrator – because no one knows for sure who it actually was. The most thuggish of all the Béziers forwards, Alain Estève – nicknamed the Beast of Béziers – was the prime suspect, but the lock, who died last year, maintained his innocence. Béziers went on to win the game and those in Toulon have never managed to forgive such an act of foul play.

It is impossible to write about Béziers salad days, too, without a mention of Armand Vaquerin. A statue of the French prop, the most successful of all time with 10 domestic titles, sits outside Béziers’ imposing Stade Raoul-Barrière to this day as a reminder of his on-field accomplishments. Off it, Vaquerin was a tearaway, and was shot dead in the town in 1993. Legend has it that he shot himself during a game of Russian Roulette but new evidence in recent years has suggested that there might have been foul play – in a town which excelled in it.

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