Slavia Sofia

For six years, from 1951, the club did not carry its own name.

The club that went through all of that traces back to 1913, when young players from two local sides, Botev and Razvitie, formed it in the Bulgarian capital. What survived the renaming is a record neither Udarnik nor ZhSK-Slavia could touch: Slavia has never dropped out of the top flight, a status it shares in Bulgaria only with Levski.

Levski is also the opponent in the Stolichno derby, contested since 15 April 1915, when Slavia won the first meeting 1-0.

Slavia's seven league titles cluster before the Second World War; between the last of them, in 1943, and the next, in 1996, fifty-three years passed. Coach Stoyan Kotsev delivered that 1996 title and the Cup in the same season. A later Cup win, in 2018, ended a 22-year wait for the trophy. The closest Slavia came to a European final was in 1966/67, when Rangers eliminated them in the Cup Winners' Cup semi-final, 1-0 home and away. Andrey Zhelyazkov, the club's record scorer and appearance-holder, left for Feyenoord in 1981 and won the Dutch title there alongside Johan Cruyff and Ruud Gullit.