Eimsbütteler TV

Altona 93 sits close enough that a match between the two carries the weight of a derby; Hamburg-Eimsbütteler Ballspiel-Club, a club born of the same district, has filled the other side of that local antagonism.

Eimsbütteler TV took the Gauliga Nordmark five times through the 1930s and into the war years, in 1934, 1935, 1936, 1940 and 1942. Nothing since has matched that run, though the club kept adding smaller honours: the Hamburg city league in 1948, the Amateurliga Hamburg in 1959, the Landesliga Hamburg-Hansa in 1998. In 2011 they beat SC Vorwärts-Wacker 04 1–0 to lift the Hamburg Cup, a result that sent them into the first round of the DFB-Pokal.

Robert Smuda came through here as a player before he went on to manage 1. FC Kaiserslautern, Hertha BSC and the Polish national team, a coaching career that outgrew the club that first gave him a shirt.

Football has never been the whole of Eimsbütteler TV. Its fistball section won German championships across four decades, from 1928 through to 1954, and its women's handball team took the national title four times between 1958 and 1967 — spells of dominance in sports that rarely get a mention alongside the football results.

Eimsbüttel gave the club its name and, in June 1889, its start. Matches are now played at the Sportzentrum Hoheluft, a ground that holds the team without much ceremony, in the district that has never stopped being the point.