Qarabag & Ajax: The Story Behind the Song

• Arthur Huizinga

  cycling editor

‘For ninety minutes,
for our club from Azerbaijan,
madhouse in the stands,
no one can stop us…’

Azerbaijan? Amsterdam should be there, right? Not for the Qarabag fans who are in the stands tonight during the Champions League match against Ajax.

The avid Qarabag fan Orkhan Salahov translated the popular Ajax chant and introduced it to the hard core of the Azerbaijani club. The song offers support to a club and its supporters who fought through three wars and yearn for a return to the destroyed home city of Agdam.

Salahov (26) has the club’s founding year (1951) tattooed on the knuckles of his fingers. On his neck is the Qarabag FK logo, a shield with Karabakh horses on either side.

Yet he will not be there tonight when Ajax visits Baku. Salahov can’t do it anymore since his best friend died at the front in 2020.

He was once a meritorious football player in the youth of FC Baku, until a collision with the post ruined his knee and career. He then found comfort and friendship with Imaret Tayfa, the hard core of Qarabag FK. That was not a coincidence.

“My parents come from Kelbajar, an area between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia. In the first Karabakh war in the 1990s, they were expelled by the Armenians, who used the area as a buffer zone against Azerbaijani offensives for almost thirty years. We are refugees, just like the Qarabag football club.”

In August 1993, Agdam, a city of about 40,000 inhabitants at the time, was captured by Armenian troops. For years, Qarabag led an itinerant life. They held their own in the Azerbaijani competition with minimal resources.

The successes came after the coincidental appointment of trainer Qurban Qurbanov in 2008.

“My first competition was in 2009,” says Salahov. “I was eight and still accompanied by my father. Qarabag, with mainly local players, won 1-0 against the Norwegian Rosenborg. An Azerbaijani club had never won against such an established name in European football. Later I joined the hard core. It did not take long before they became my friends.”

Qarabag is now the sole ruler in Azerbaijani football. Qarabag has won eleven of the last twelve national titles. The club has also been a regular customer in Europe for years, reaching the group stage of the Champions League for the first time in 2017.

That season, ’90 minutes long’ rolled off the stands in Baku for the first time. “I showed it to friends and at the next home match I started singing alone,” said Salahov. “I quickly noticed that it was catching on. I never thought it would take off so quickly.”

The club’s success was a welcome gift to the authoritarian regime in Baku. After all, that regime had been preparing for a war of reconquest in Nagorno-Karabakh since the 1995 ceasefire.

Slowly but surely, Qarabag was embraced as the national pride of Azerbaijan. After all, every victory of Qarabag was a reminder of ‘the occupation of Azerbaijani territory’ by Armenians.

In September 2020 – while the world was dealing with the corona pandemic – President Ilham Aliyev felt the moment had come to use military supremacy over Armenia. In a 44-day battle, the districts surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh and parts of the region itself were recaptured.

Two years later, all of Nagorno-Karabakh was captured and virtually all remaining Armenian residents were expelled. In recent months, a peace treaty has been negotiated between Azerbaijan and Armenia and mutual relations are slowly being restored.