Alkar

A cup final reached in 2025, lost to Split, is the kind of thing the club can still produce despite never lifting the national championship itself — Sinj measures its seasons in occasions like that one rather than trophies.

The club started out as KK Tekstilac in 1955 and took the Alkar name a decade later. What has stuck harder than either name is a line off a banner from 1984: "Najveći mali klub na svitu" — the biggest small club in the world. The fans who carried that banner still call themselves the Sinjski Maligani, and the phrase describes the arithmetic of the place better than any factsheet could: a team from a town this size against Bosna, and losing.

Mladen Pavić, known to everyone simply as Kembo, is where that story has its centre — captain, then coach, his number 5 retired by a club that does not have many numbers to spare. Josip Vranković came on loan from Split before going on to win bronze with Yugoslavia at the 1994 World Championship, a detail Alkar mentions the way a small club mentions anyone who passed through and made something bigger of it.

The derby that still matters most is the one against GKK Šibenka, the Dalmatinski derbi. What Alkar has never managed, across all of it, is the one thing the nickname quietly concedes: a national title to go with the near-misses.