Hertha BSC U19

Three-one against Schalke 04 in the 2018 final settled something Hertha's youth setup had chased for years: a first national A-Junioren-Bundesliga title, taken on the pitch rather than handed down through reputation. It arrived at a club whose senior side had been kicking a ball in Berlin since 25 July 1892, but the academy runs on its own clock, and 2018 was its breakthrough.

The Junior Cup came twice — 2015 against Energie Cottbus, settled 1–0, and again in 2022 past 1. FC Köln. Between those two wins the regional Nord/Nordost league title became something close to routine, taken in four straight seasons from 2020/21 through 2023/24, with semi-final runs nationally in 2022 and 2023 that never quite repeated the 2018 final.

What the academy is best known for is what it sends upward. Kevin-Prince Boateng came through the youth ranks from 1996 and made his first-team debut in 2005; his half-brother Jérôme followed the same path from 2002, debuting in 2007. Pál Dárdai took a longer route still — through the academy, into the record books as the club's longest-serving player, and eventually back as head coach, which gives the place a rare kind of continuity: the same man shaped by the youth system later shaping it.

Derby day against Union Berlin sharpened considerably once Union reached the Bundesliga, with the first competitive meeting between the sides in 2010 giving a modern edge to a rivalry that used to run, in an older Berlin, against Tennis Borussia.

Matches are played at the Olympiapark-Amateurstadion in Berlin-Westend, a 5,400-capacity ground tucked into the same complex as the Olympiastadion. For the 2023–24 season the team had to move out to the Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Sportpark while the Amateurstadion hosted training for UEFA Euro 2024 — a groundshare that outlived the Jahnsportpark itself, demolished later that year.