MTK Budapest

Home games these days go ahead at the Hidegkuti Nándor Stadion, a ground that holds just 5,322 and reopened in 2016 after a full rebuild on the site of the old stadium named for Nándor Hidegkuti. Blue and white cover the seats and the crest, and that colour scheme is where the nickname comes from: the Blues & Whites of Budapest.

The club started out on 16 November 1888 as Magyar Testgyakorlók Köre, and the name has rarely stayed still since. It became Hungária MTK FC in 1926, was disbanded outright by the fascist regime in 1940 and did not reappear until 1945. Through the 1950s it played under a string of state-approved labels — Budapesti Textiles SE, Budapesti Bástya SE, Budapesti Vörös Lobogó SE — before settling as MTK-Vörös Meteor from 1975. The current name, MTK Budapest FC, has only been in use since 2003.

What the name changes obscure is how often the team was winning underneath them. MTK have taken the Nemzeti Bajnokság I title 43 times, a tally built mostly in the decades before the Second World War, when the championship barely left the club between 1904 and the mid-1920s. A smaller revival came in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when league titles were paired with Magyar Kupa wins and three Szuperkupa triumphs, in 1997, 2003 and 2008.

None of that carries the weight of a match against Ferencváros. The two sides first met in 1903, and the fixture is known in Hungary as the Örökrangadó, the eternal derby, the oldest rivalry in the country's football. By 2024 they had played each other more than 225 times.