Thor Akureyri U19

Aron Gunnarsson learned the game on the pitches of Akureyri before Þór ever mattered to anyone outside the town, moving through the club's youth ranks in 2004 and 2005 and making his senior debut in 2005, a season before AZ Alkmaar came calling. He came back twice, first in 2024 and again in 2026, by which point Þórsarar had a top-flight return to offer him: the 1. deild karla title of 2025 put the club back among Iceland's elite after an absence stretching to a 2014 relegation.

That is closer to the pattern of the club's life than any run of trophies. Þór, founded on 6 June 1915, has never won the Icelandic championship, and its closest brushes with a major honour have come in the cup, where it finished runner-up in 1989, 2011 and 2013 without lifting the trophy any of those three times. The 2012/13 run to the Europa League brought a 5-1 win over Bohemians Dublin in the first qualifying round, earned only because Þór had reached that year's cup final.

For three decades the club did not exist as a separate football side at all. Between 1943 and 1974, Þór's team merged with local rivals KA Akureyri under the name ÍBA Akureyri, and it was that combined side, not Þór itself, that played in the top flight through those years. The split in 1974 restored the old rivalry, and matches against KA still carry the weight of the north's local derby. Home games are played at Þórsvöllur, a ground that holds around 1,500.

Gunnarsson's is still the name that travels furthest from Akureyri, and the one the club's supporters point to first.