++ [ originally posted by Padovano ] ++
Belgium's Inter? Standard Liege is the greatest club team in the history of Europe. They won eight consecutive Champions Cups prior to the reign of Real Madrid, but nobody knows about it. Josef Stalin had all the football records of Standard purged becuase he did not like the club colors, so it is now as if the victories were never won.
That is correct. Stalin initially asked Standard to change the electric red of their shirts into a more conservative and fitting Marxist red. But the then President of Standard, Jean-Robert de Padoue, refused to oblige, claiming that he had chosen that colour as a reference to the red latex stilettos his first girlfriend wore when they met. He was promptly sent to a gulag in Russia's Far East Republic of Kamtchaka, where he earned a reputation for knitting authentic sheep ponchos for German POW's and Soviet dissidents. Taking advantage from his captors' trust, de Padoue managed to escape the gulag by progressively digging a hole into his cell's wall with the heel of his girlfriend's red stilettos, which, as a reward for his good behaviour, he had been allowed to keep as a reminder of days gone by. On February 22nd 1953, de Padoue arrived on the Eastern coast of Asia, where the Korean War was raging. He was spotted by a US patrol boat that decided to take him aboard and then back to America. Upon his arrival in the land of the free, he pronounced these words : "America, I have walked a long way to reach your shores, and now the time has come for me to take off my shoes"