Lokomotiv Plovdiv

The 2004 league title stands alone in Lokomotiv Plovdiv's cabinet. Georgi Iliev wore the armband through that season, the midfielder around whom the side was built when it finally finished above everyone else. Nothing since has come close to it in the league.

The cups arrived much later and in a rush. Lokomotiv beat Botev Plovdiv in the 2019 final to win the Bulgarian Cup — the derby that decides bragging rights in the city — then kept it in 2020, adding a second Supercup in the same stretch. Before all that, in 1982–83, the club won the Soviet Army Cup, the competition that preceded the modern Bulgarian Cup.

Hristo Bonev is the name that carries furthest. He played 404 matches for Lokomotiv between 1964 and 1979, scoring 180 goals, and remains the leading scorer in the history of the Bulgarian national team with 48. Georgi Sokolov, a generation before him, scored 102 for the club between 1951 and 1964, still the record at Lokomotiv.

The black shirt with thin white pinstripes traces back to Sportclub Plovdiv, the predecessor from which the club emerged in 1926, and the railway trade it was named for. The strip is also where the nickname comes from: supporters and opponents alike call them the Smurfs, alongside the Railwaymen and the Black-Whites. Red has appeared in the club's past, but the black and white have held.

Home is the Lokomotiv stadium in the park of the same name, known in the city as Lauta, holding 14,000 after the Besik stand went up from 2021.

What the club has not managed is a second championship. Twenty-two years on from 2004, the trophies that have come are cups — knockout football, where a single result can carry a season. The league has stayed out of reach.