Optik Rathenow

Stadion Vogelgesang holds 5,000. It is the ground where a club has played since the football department broke away in 1991.

Jörg Heinrich came through the last of those, BSG Motor Rathenow, before he went on to Borussia Dortmund and won the Champions League with them.

The new club moved quickly. It won the Landesliga Brandenburg in 1991, then the Brandenburg-Liga a year later, and it played in the DFB-Pokal main round in 1991–92. By 1994 it had reached the third tier, the Regionalliga Nordost, and stayed until 1997. The goalkeeper Vyacheslav Chanov, a Soviet international, kept goal here between 1990 and 1993, in the years when the club was finding its feet.

The stronger run came two decades later. Optik won the Brandenburg Cup in 2013 and 2014, where the draw gave them FC St. Pauli. They lost that tie, but it was the same season they won the NOFV-Oberliga Nord, the fifth tier, and they took it again in 2017–18. Hassan Oumari, a Lebanon international, played for them in 2014–15, during the first of those titles.

The local rivalry is with MSV Neuruppin, and the fixture is called the Havelland Derby. On a match day it is played on the pitch at Vogelgesang, in front of a crowd from Rathenow.