Artis Brno aims to win over the city’s football fans, challenging historic Zbrojovka. Attendance, trends and the club’s potential appeal to expats.
There are people who believe football is first and foremost a matter of belonging. Belonging to a place, in many cases.
I’ve personally always felt a bit like a man without a country. I love my homeland—viscerally, provincially, sometimes in ways I can’t even rationalise — but I only lived there until the end of my adolescence. Then I left, almost a form of self-exile (also to escape that very provincial mindset). And the local team? I’ve always liked them, but I’d never call myself a real supporter.
Since I was a kid, I’ve supported Inter Milan—Internazionale already in the name, not by chance.
But try explaining that to people back home. At the club’s founding, Muggiani said it clearly: “It will be called Internazionale, because we are brothers of the world.” Yet for many of my fellow Italians, I’m little more than an embarrassment.
Because I don’t support the local team.
All this preamble brings me to a club in the Czech second division, determined to do better than Zbrojovka. Yes, Zbrojovka is Brno’s historic team, but its glory days—few as they were, with just one league title in its entire history—are long gone. After all, if Prague can have several teams, why shouldn’t the country’s second-largest city have two?
In my own hometown, with roughly the same population as Brno, a similar attempt was made—and it failed. After an initial spark (in the third division), the younger club, Atletico Catania, slid back into amateur football, and everyone returned to supporting the main team (Catania).
As fate would have it, even though I’ve always only supported Inter, I actually played for Atletico Catania between the ages of 10 and 13.
But anyway. Will Lizen—now Artis Brno—manage to win the hearts of the Brňáci?
Let’s take a look at a few numbers. Artis Brno averaged just under 2,300 spectators per match: about half of Zbrojovka’s 4,400 fans at home games. In some way, though, Artis’ arrival has actually done Zbrojovka some good. After being relegated to the second division, Brno’s main team finished ninth and seventh—far from the promotion zone.
This season, before the winter break, Zbrojovka is leading the league (with Artis in a very respectable third place, strong enough to aim for the promotion playoffs).
Looking at public interest across the Czech Republic, Zbrojovka has been far more searched for over the past year — though on a few occasions, Artis even managed to overtake them. (We weren’t able to embed the original Google Trends graph, so we created a stylized AI version instead; it’s accurate overall, but it does contain small errors — for example, it doesn’t properly show those brief overtakes. If you want to see the original data, just click on the image).
In short, there has been an impact—both in terms of stadium attendance (Artis is the third team in the league for average crowd, according to Transfermarkt) and in online interest.
What we’d like to suggest, from these lines, is that the club’s owner might consider embracing a more international soul. Brno is full of expats, and only a few (including some friends of mine—whose excellent podcast I’ll link here) actually follow Zbrojovka. For a new club, not deeply tied to local identity, tapping into this potential fanbase would be a smart move.
And it might even pay off more than custom trams with the team logo.
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