Buchonia Flieden

Flieden sits in East Hesse, and for over a century the village's football has run through one club, SV Buchonia Flieden, formed in January 1912 at the inn "Zum Hasen." "Buchonia" is an old Latin term for the beech-wooded Hesse countryside, and it stuck as the side's identity long before anyone thought to call the players "Die Buchonen."

It reached the Oberliga Hessen, the fourth tier, in 1996 before drifting back down. The Verbandsliga Hessen-Nord title has come round three times, in 1996, 2001 and 2017. The high point came earlier still: in 1980, Buchonia reached the final of the Hessenpokal and lost 0–2 to RSV Würges, a defeat that nonetheless sent the club into the DFB-Pokal. There, in front of a crowd of around 2,500, they were beaten 1–4 by 2. Bundesliga side FC Ingolstadt 04 — the one occasion East Hesse football met a professional club on level terms.

Locally, the club's business is with SV Steinbach, and the meetings between the two are simply the Ost-Hessen-Derby, the fixture that matters more than any table position. The measure of Buchonia's depth came in 2010, not from a single result but from an afternoon when all three senior sides went up together, a rare thing for a village club to manage in one go.

All of it still plays out at the Stadion am Weiher, holding around 2,000 in blue and white, a modest ground for a club whose biggest nights were always borrowed from somewhere bigger.