Monheim

Monheim am Rhein sits in the Kreis Mettmann, and its football club has spent most of a century circling the same middling divisions. 1. FC Monheim grew out of a gymnastics and sports society, with the first football played in 1912, two years after the club's founding. Between 1955 and 1962 it existed under a different name, Sportfreunde Monheim-Baumberg, after merging with Sportfreunde Baumberg 1926 — a spell that included promotion to the Bezirksliga in 1960 under Paul Janes, a former German international, before the two sides went their separate ways again and Monheim took back its original name.

The club plays at the Rheinstadion, rebuilt in 2022 with a new 500-seat stand added to a ground that still holds only 1,500 people.

André Maczkowiak's career traces the club's shape from the inside: a goalkeeper who left for 1. FC Köln's reserve side, returned to Monheim in 2012, retired in 2017, and stayed on as assistant manager. Andreas Kaiser went the other way, leaving Monheim's youth ranks for Fortuna Düsseldorf and 181 appearances there.

In the Verbandspokal, the Lower Rhine's regional cup, Monheim's furthest run stopped at the semi-final, in 2018/19.