Garbarnia Kraków

Garbarnia Kraków has never been able to claim Cracovia or Wisła Kraków as its own rival in the way those two claim each other in the Holy War. What it has instead is a smaller, older grudge: matches against Cracovia have long been called the "small Kraków derby", a contest that mattered most when Garbarnia still had the standing to make it one. In the lower leagues of recent years, that need for an opponent worth the name has shifted to Hutnik Kraków and Pogoń Kraków.

The club grew out of a workplace, not a neighbourhood. In 1921, employees of the Polish Tannery Works in the Ludwinów district formed a team they first called Lauda, renaming it Garbarnia three years later after the tannery itself — a link kept alive in the nickname Garbarze, the Tanners. The brown of the badge comes from the same trade. RKS Garbarnia, the name settled on in 1971, is the club's sixth.

The single season that defines the club came in 1931, when Garbarnia won the Polish Championship, two years after finishing runner-up. Otto Riesner, a Poland international who played for the club between 1930 and 1937, was part of that title-winning side. The youth ranks later produced Robert Gadocha, who left the academy in 1965 for a career that brought Olympic gold in 1972 and a World Cup bronze medal in 1974 — honours won far from Ludwinów.

None of that continued after 1971. Garbarnia dropped to the third division and stayed away from the second tier for 44 years, returning only in 2018 before going straight back down the following season. Since then the slide has kept going: third division in 2019, fourth in 2023, sixth in 2024, with promotion back to the fourth arriving in 2025. A club that once beat the whole country to a championship now plays for a return to football most of Poland barely watches.