MKK Kumanovo

Kumanovo is back in the Macedonian Superleague under a name only three years old. MKK Kumanovo formed in 2023 after Kumanovo 2009 dropped out of the top flight, taking up a place its predecessor could not hold.

That older club dates to 1946 and spent the following decades under the name KK Kumanovo, winning the Yugoslav Macedonian Republic League in 1980 before finishing runner-up in the national league three times, in 2002, 2015 and 2016. Financial trouble folded the club in 2003; a 2009 relaunch kept the city in the game until it too gave way to the current entity.

The Balkan League final of 2017 sits alongside those domestic near-misses, and the run there owed something to a roster built two seasons earlier, when Vukašin Mandić and Sasha Avramović carried the side through the 2014/15 Balkan League campaign.

Games against KK Gostivar carry the weight of a derby in the local press, drawing a crowd the Kumani, organised since 1990, fill with the kind of noise a 300-seat hall makes louder than the number suggests. Pero Nakov Hall has staged every home game the club has played, old name and new.