FC Lahti

Football there ran through two clubs that spent decades on opposite sides of the same town, until in November 1996 Kuusysi and Lahden Reipas folded into one another and left the city with a single senior team. There has been no local derby since, for the simple reason that there is nobody left to play.

What the merger did produce was an inherited quarrel. Reipas had a low-level rivalry with HJK Helsinki going back to the 1960s, and FC Lahti took it on along with everything else. Matches between the two have brought crowd trouble and incidents outside the ground, which in Finnish football is unusual enough to be worth noting.

The trophy cabinet holds three Liigacup wins — 2007, 2013 and 2016 — with two lost finals before the first of them, in 2004 and 2005. The league title has stayed out of reach; third place in 2008 and again in 2014 is as close as the club has come. A Suomen Cup final in 2002 ended the same way.

Home is the Toolpoint Arena , opened in 1981 after work on the main stand began in the mid-1970s. It holds 14,500: individual seats went into the north stand in 2000, the south stand three years later, and a larger refit in 2014–15 repaired the roof and added a solar panel.

Jari Litmanen belongs to the older story rather than the new one. He came up as a boy at Reipas Lahti before Ajax, Barcelona and Liverpool, and he came back twice — briefly in 2004, then across 2009 and 2010, by which point the club he returned to was one that had not existed when he left.