VC Eendracht Aalst 2002 (Belgium)

Now here's another one of those clubs that play in black and white stripes - but not entirely as you might imagine. Eendracht Aalst are the historic successors to a team called K.S.C. Eendracht Aalst, from the Flanders town of Aalst, who went out of business in 2002. They play at the same ground to the same fans, so in effect are the same club in all but name. They used to be top flight regulars, but after their bankruptcy were required to start all over again in the third tier, and since then have frequently bounced up and down between there and the second division.

The original club formed in 1919, by veterans of the First World War. Their most notorious year though was in the 1961/62 season when part way though a niggly game against Standard Liege resulted in an on-the- pitch punch up between players - which led in turn to a full-scale riot that resulted in the game being abandoned. The club were forced to play some games behind closed doors, many players were suspended for many games, and the club's physical coach was banned from operating for 12 months. The club never recovered and finished bottom that season - taking them another 29 years to get back to the top flight. Has one mad game ever led to such a long-term downfall?

However, by the 1990s they recovered to such an extent that a fourth- place finish in the premier league led them to a small foray into Europe in 1995, where after beating Levski Sofia in the first round they got battered by Roma in the next. Their only other laurels have been two second division championship titles.

They play at the 7000 capacity Pierre Cornelisstadion, and go by the lovely nickname De Ajuinen - Dutch for The Onions. This carries through to their rather unlikely mascot, who appears to be a massive stripy black and white clove of garlic. As far as their strip goes, although frequently flirting with a more traditional striped kit, they currently play in a strange kit with two bold stripes down one side - although we're quite sure that this is only a temporary measure and they'll try out every possible configuration of the famous kit in the future.

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Atherton Collieries AFC (England)

Atherton Collieries were created in 1916 in the small town of Atherton - halfway between Salford and Wigan - by a group of miners from the area's six pits, as a means to providing welfare and entertainment to the people who stayed back home to work on the war effort. Intrinsically linked to both the pits and the people who worked down them, the club was given to the people of the town when the mines were nationalised in 1946.

They currently play in the First Division of the North West Counties League - the tenth level of the English football pyramid. But don't think that this makes them a lowly team, as they have got a fine battling tradition in the local leagues of the Greater Manchester area. They've won the Bolton Combination ten times, and their six victories in the Lancashire FA Amateur Shield is a record that still stands to this day. 

Variously dubbed The Colls, The Miners, and most cutely, Sooty, they play at the 2,500 capacity Alder Street stadium - much of it built with railway sleepers - and despite having an average gate of less than 100, their record attendance was in 2007, when FC United of Manchester, on their charge through the lower leagues, pumped the gate for their home game up to 1461 - more than doubling their average attendance for that season.

They have hit the new more recently, however, after the local FA compained about their new kit, claiming that it was too similar to the local ref's kit. So after 94 years of playing in the barcode stripes, they've been temporarily force to change their colours until another black and white strip can be found. The good thing though is that their offending kit - seen above - had been retired unbeaten, having played just one home league game and one home cup game in the strip!

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PHC Zebras (Bermuda)

The Zebras are an amateur football club based around the Pembroke Hamilton Club in Pembroke Parish in Bermuda. The original PHC started life as a yachting club way back in 1876. But it wasn't until 1960 that the club decided to broaden its horizons from being a mere drop-in sports club and move into other more active sports - and in particular become a major force in the island's football world.

They acquired the stadium in Warwick where they still play today, and merged with Key West Rangers, and set about prettying up their new ground - which until then had been used for motorcross, horse racing and as a golf driving range. It is said that their management team of that time was so distinguished that they could quite easily have run the country.

They play their football in the Bermuda Football Assoc Premier Division - the top flight in Bermudan football - where they play splendidly named teams like Boulevard Blazers, Devonshire Cougars and the current champions Dandy Town Hornets. They've won the national league nine times, the Bermuda Cup ten times, and in all have evidence of 39 trophies in the silverware cabinet.

Perhaps their two most famous old boys are former Stoke City cult hero Kyle Lightbourne, and the heaviest man ever to play in the cricket World Cup, the man mountain Dwayne 'Sluggo' Leverock - and when he tackled you, you stayed tackled for some days!

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Maidenhead United (England)

Those of you not up-to-speed with the glorious world of non-league football may still be aware of Maidenhead United - but not be entirely sure why. Well perhaps it's because the hold a couple of pretty spectacular records. Formed in 1870 as Maidenhead Football Club, they played their first game at their second home in York Road on 16 February 1871 against their life-long local rivals Marlow, where they have played continuously ever since. This makes theirs the oldest continuously used football ground in the world!

It was also apt that it was Marlow that they played in that first game, as the pair of them are tied in having played in the most FA Cup competitions - the oldest knockout tournament in the world - having each missed just the one year since it was first played back in 1871. This makes them the teams with the longest involvement in a single tournament in history! Most clubs don't get remotely close to having even one world record, so this little club from the middle-sized town in Berkshire is supremely blessed to have two!

York Road can squeeze 3000 into its quaint concretey enclosure, and its creaky old club houses and tea huts are among the best loved in the upper echelons of the non-league pyramid. Currently mid-table regulars in the Blue Square South - the sixth tier in English football - their pinacle of their footballing achievements was when they reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup - although that was back in its debut year when only 15 clubs had entered.

Things began to move along a little more when they merged with their less popular local rivals Maidenhead Norfolkians and first adopted the stripes in 1920, and called the new club first Maidenhead Town, and very soon after Maidenhead United, the name they have kept to this day. Despite York Road's thankfully small health and safety sensible crowd limit, their biggest gate was a massive 7989 when they played Southall in the quarter finals of the FA Amateur Cup in 1936 - and if any of you have ever lucky enough to have visited the place, you'll be at a loss to work out where they managed to put them all!

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Vissel Kobe (Japan)

Now here's a cautionary tale in these days of corporate clubs that become the idle play things of the mega rich. Vissel Kobe are a historic Japanese club. Formed in 1966 as the Kawasaki Steel Soccer Club from the city of Kurashiki, they finally found their way to the Japanese Soccer League Division 2 in 1986, and stayed there until the league folded in 1992. Two years later the city of Kobe came to an arrangement with Kawasaki Steel - the company that owned the club, to move them about 160 miles up the coast and compete for a spot in the newly formed J League.

The new club was dubbed Vissel - a mix up word blending Victory and Vessel - noting the city's maritime heritage. They joined the league in the second tier, and had the giant supermarket chain Daiei in as a sponsor. But then things took a major turn for the worse. First the Great Hanshin earthquake decimated the city of Kobe, and then the local financial downturn led Daiei to pull out - leaving the devistated city of Kobe to foot the bill for the club. Despite all of this, they were promoted to the J League as runners up in 1996.

They pottered around for a few years, their lack of a major corporate sponsor meaning that although safe, they never looked a danger to take a title. In 2004, Vissel were so skint that the city sold them to a company called The Crimson Group, run by a local character called Hiroshi Mikitani. Now the clue should have been in the name of the group, but after only a short time in charge, Mikitani horrified life-long supporters of the club who'd followed them through all the change and disasters that befell them, by changing their historic black and white striped kit to a sort of off-crimson - resembling Arsenal's centenary kit - which just happened to be the colour of hist university - Harvard Business School.

They may now be competing more readily in the J League, and playing at the space-age 30,132 Home's Stadium, but the fans are still not happy about the change, and a good many still wear their old black and white striped kit when they attend the games. Japanese football has always been inextricably linked to business, but let this be a warning to us all. If some mega rich sheikh or oligarch comes in to buy up a famous and historic club over here, the very same thing could happen. Will we be seeing Newcastle United playing in pink? Or Man City playing in the green of Saudi Arabia? Only time - and money - will tell.

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Dick, Kerr's Ladies FC (England)

The name of this blog is perhaps a little one-sided, leaving out a little over half of the world's population. This is especially short-sighted of me when you remember that probably the most successful team to have ever played in black and white stripes - and perhaps even one of the greatest teams of all time - was entirely populated by ladies - Dick, Kerr's Ladies.

The team were founded as a works team at the Dick, Kerr & Company munitions factory in Preston during the First World War. The company's two Scotts founders started to employ women workers in 1914 to help with the war effort, and although women had initially been prevented from playing sport, they figured it may help with morale in the factory if they got a football team together. After beating the factory's men's side in their first game, word got around that they could play a bit, and under the managership of office worker Alfred Frankland they began to play a series of friendlies and exhibition matches around the country to raise funds for injured servicemen.

They played in the famous black and white, unless they were playing under the banner of the England Ladies team, in which case they played in the traditional plain white. They were however required to wear wooly hats in the team's colours, as it was not thought becoming for ladies to be playing with their hair flowing free back in those days.

They started to draw big crowds, and in time Dick, Kerr & Company decided to pay the players ten shillings a game to cover their expenses. On Christmas Day 1917, 10,000 people came to watch them play at Preston North End's Deepdale ground in an era starved of football by the onslaught of war. In 1920 they played the first ladies international against a French side from Paris as part of a four game tour, which they won 2-0, going on to win the series by three games to one. Then followed a return tour of France in which they won one and drew three. This tour garnered so much attention that their Boxing Day game at at Goodison Park against St Helens Ladies attracted 53,000 spectators. 

Such was their popularity that the FA banned women's football at all FA grounds on 5th December 1921 - a band that stood, quite unbelievably, until July 1971s. This led them to go out on tour and play all of their games abroad - even getting throw of Canada who came out in solidarily with the FA. In the late 1920s they changed their name to Preston Ladies, and continued on until they were eventually disbanded in 1965.

Their record over their 50-odd years was incomparable. In total they played 828 games, of which they won 758, drew 46 and lost a measly 24 - not bad when you consider that many of their exhibition games were against senior men's teams. So raise your (wooly) hats for Dick, Kerr's Ladies FC - quite possibly the most successful football team of all time!

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ABC FC (Brazil)

ABC Futebol Clube come from the north east Brazilian city of Natal - the nearest point of the South American continent to Africa. The name of the city means Christmas in Portuguese, in commemoration of the day that its original village was founded in 1599. The club themselves were formed in 1914 in a meeting at the home of Colonel Avelino Alves Freire, where it was also decided that they'd play in the black and white stripes. The ABC of the name stands for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and made reference to a friendship pact signed by the three countries in 1903.

Defining their home ground is a little tricky right now. Officially they play at the 30,000 capacity Estádio Dr. João Cláudio Vasconcelos Machado - although this is due to be demolished at the end of 2010 to make way for the new Arena das Dunas in time for the 2014 World Cup. They also own the 18,000 capacity Estádio Maria Lamas Farache, which is where they'll be playing when their older, larger home is being pulled down.

They play in the Campeonato Brasileiro Série C, the third level of Brazilian football, after their relegatation in 2009. But they also take part in the Campeonato Potiguar, which is the state championship of the Rio Grande do Norte province, that they have won a staggering 51 times. This success got them recognised in the Guinness Book of Records as having the longest run of consecutive league wins when they took the title every year in a run lasting between 1932 and 1941.

They go by the nickname of O Mais Querido - which means Most Wanted. Their first ever game was against their local rivals Natal Esporte Club, which they won 13-1 - a promising start to their career. 

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