Why the next town along always has a bad reputation

Take two neighbouring towns, anywhere on the planet. The odds are strong that each holds a firm opinion about the other, that the opinion is unfavourable, and that it rests on three or four clichés neither side has ever checked. The pattern is so regular that it counts among the few genuinely universal social facts.

The narcissism of small differences

The most useful insight here is an old one: hostility runs hottest between similar communities, precisely because their resemblance forces them to invent differences. Two cities five thousand kilometres apart have no reason to dislike each other — they do not compare themselves. Two cities fifty kilometres apart share a climate, a language and an economy: the only way to exist separately is to exaggerate what little separates them.

Which explains an amusing regularity: the complaints levelled at the neighbouring town are almost always the same ones, everywhere. It is pretentious, or it is dirty; its people are cold, or they are loud; the food is bad; they talk strangely. These grievances are interchangeable because they describe nothing: their only function is to mark a border.

A rivalry needs a venue

To last, the animosity has to replay somewhere on a regular basis. Historically it did so at fairs, processions, conscription and parish rivalries. Today it runs overwhelmingly through professional sport, which supplies a calendar, a scoreline and a socially acceptable outlet.

This creates an optical illusion: people believe sport created the rivalry, when all it did was provide a stage. The most intense rivalries generally involve places that already had reasons to compare themselves — a political capital against an economic one, a port against an inland city, an industrial town against an administrative one.

Two models, not two teams

That is why we frame these matches as cities rather than clubs. A contest between two teams depends on a league table that changes every season and excludes everyone who does not follow the sport. A contest between two cities interests everybody, including — often especially — people who have never watched a match.

The underlying argument is almost always the same: two irreconcilable urban models. Density against sprawl, centre against periphery, a city you visit against a city you live in. Each judges the other by what it values in itself, which guarantees nobody will ever be right.

What a counter really measures here

This needs saying plainly, because it is the category where the misunderstanding would be easiest: a vote between two cities does not say which is nicer, bigger or better run. It measures capacity to mobilise, which depends on three things — population, intensity of local attachment, and what time of day people are online.

The second factor is the most discriminating, and it is very unevenly distributed. Some cities have a local pride their inhabitants express spontaneously; others are populated mostly by people who were not born there and feel no obligation to defend them. A wide gap in this kind of match therefore mainly measures that difference in fervour — which is, in itself, a rare figure and hard to obtain any other way.

An almost inexhaustible supply of matches

Every country has its own pairs of rival cities, and the pattern repeats everywhere: a capital against a large southern city, two competing ports, two regions claiming the same dish. That makes this the most extensible category on the site: each country that opens will bring its own rivalries, with exactly the same mechanics and results nobody could predict from outside.

Sources: social psychology literature on hostility between closely related groups (the narcissism of small differences); urban history research on municipal rivalries and their transfer to professional sport during the twentieth century.