Hamburger SV II

Son Heung-min spent 2010 in Hamburg reserve colours, six appearances and a single goal. Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting stayed longer, four seasons from 2007, thirty-one appearances. Amadou Onana passed through the same dressing room.

Hasan Salihamidžić's name turns up in the record for a single cup tie in 1995–96. The reserve side's own honours belong to an earlier, more local era — a Verbandsliga Hamburg title won three times through the 1980s, a Hamburger Pokal collected across the 1990s — before restructuring pushed German reserve football into the regional tiers, where second-place finishes in the Regionalliga Nord in 2017–18 and 2022–23 mark the closest the team has come to promotion since.

Sidney Sam and Tunay Torun both put together their heaviest minutes here in the late 2000s, Torun's sixteen goals in forty-seven appearances the kind of return that persuades a club to keep faith with a player rather than move him on early.

Derby weekends against FC St. Pauli II carry more weight than the league table suggests, the city's rivalry playing out a level down from where it is usually watched. The games themselves are contested at the Wolfgang-Meyer-Sportanlage in Eimsbüttel, where Regionalliga licensing limits the crowd to 1,318, a small ground for a team that keeps sending players somewhere bigger.