Panionios

Nikos Anastopoulos, Thomas Mavros and Dimitris Saravakos all came through the same club in the 1980s, and Greek football spent that decade watching three centre-forwards who had learned the game in Nea Smyrni. Panionios did not keep them, and it rarely kept anyone.

The club itself arrived in that suburb as refugees did. It began in Smyrna in 1890 as Orpheus Smyrni, took the name Panionios after a merger with a local gymnastic society in 1898, and lost the city altogether after the Greco-Turkish War and the population exchange that followed. The members who reached Athens settled among other Smyrniots in the district they named Nea Smyrni, and the club went with them. Blue and red have been read ever since as the flag and the blood of the persecuted.

The ground has been home since 1939. Its biggest night came in 1974 against Panathinaikos, when 20,950 got in — a figure the modern all-seater version, licensed for about 11,700, will never approach.

Two Greek Cups sit against a hundred and thirty years. The second, in 1998, was won 1–0 against Panathinaikos and carried the club into the following season's Cup Winners' Cup, where they ground their way to the quarter-finals before Lazio, who went on to win it, put them out.

The derby that matters is against Apollon Smyrnis, the other club that came out of Smyrna and settled nearby.

The league title has never come. Runners-up in 1950–51 and again in 1970–71 is as close as Panionios has been, and the second of those seasons is now more than half a century old.