Vllaznia Shkodër

The club dates to 16 February 1919, which makes it the oldest football club in Albania still in continuous operation, and locally it carries a nickname that reflects exactly that: Djepi i Futbollit Shqiptar, the cradle of Albanian football. Nine league titles came across the decades, the first pair either side of the Second World War in 1945 and 1946, the most recent in 2001. The Albanian Cup has come to Shkodër eight times, and the gap in that list is its own story: 1987 to 2008 without the trophy, then back-to-back wins in 2021 and 2022.

Among the names attached to the club, Elseid Hysaj stands out for where the academy took him: a Shkodër-born full-back who went on to captain the Albania national team and to play in Serie A for Napoli and Lazio. Ownership has changed hands more than once since the Municipality of Shkodër controlled the club directly; Alban Xhaferi bought it in 2021 for 65 million lekë, taking over from the Swiss-led group that had run it since 2014.

No fixture in Albanian football carries more weight than Vllaznia against Tirana, contested since the two clubs' earliest years and known simply as Derbi më i vjetër shqiptar, the oldest derby in the country. A second rivalry, with Partizani, has always carried a different charge: Shkodër in the north against the club long associated with the capital and the old communist establishment.