DEAC

Four times DEAC has climbed to the top of the Nemzeti Bajnokság III, the country's third tier, and each occasion sits decades apart from the last — 1960–61, 1985–86, 2007–08, 2019–20. No Magyar Kupa run has ever come with it; the club's ceiling in the second division was an eighth-place finish back in that same 1960–61 campaign, and it has stayed there since.

The football side traces back to 1919, set up under the Debrecen Royal Hungarian University after the earlier Debreceni Akadémiai Atlétikai Club folded, itself a descendant of a sports society founded in 1867. Communist-era reorganisation renamed the club repeatedly through the late 1940s and 1950s, and again between 1979 and 1991, before DEAC returned as DEAC in 1991. The black and white colours date to 1921, giving the club its nickname, Fekete-fehérek.

Debrecen's other side, Debreceni VSC, has always been the measure. The derby carried a social charge from the start — DEAC drew on university students with a right-wing, Catholic identity, DVSC on the Reformed bourgeoisie — and it turned violent once, after a 1922 match against DTE. The fixture largely disappeared from view after 1989, when the clubs last met in a meaningful second-division match; they found each other again only in 2020, when DVSC dropped into NB II.

DEAC has never been just a football club. Olga Gyarmati won Olympic gold in the long jump for the university society in 1948, and István Göri walked in the 1964 Games under the same colours — a reminder that the black and white shirts made their name on running tracks as often as on the pitch at the Egyetemi Sporttelep.