Slovan Liberec

Liberec sit in the Czech First League, and the season ahead is another one spent in the middle of it rather than near the top. The last trophy came in 2015.

That 2015 cup final was settled on penalties against Jablonec — the neighbours from 20 minutes down the road, the club Liberec meet in what everyone in the north calls the Podještědí derby. Winning a final against them is a different currency from winning one against anybody else, and it remains the most recent thing the club can point to.

Before that came the league titles: 2002, 2006, 2012. The first of them mattered beyond Liberec, because no club from outside Prague had won the Czech championship until Slovan did it. Two more followed within a decade, which for a club founded in 1958 in a city of that size was an unusual run. The 2012 side went into the Czech Supercup as champions and won nothing there.

The ground, U Nisy, holds 9,900 — small by the standards of the clubs Slovan were beating in those years, and a fair measure of what the three titles actually took. The badge carries the blue and white of the city together with Ještěd, the mountain that stands over it, and the blue-and-white pairing gave the team its name in the stands: Modrobílí.

Teplice, the other North Bohemian side, provide a second derby, though it has never carried what the Jablonec fixture does.

Eleven years on from the cup, the immediate task is narrower than it was in the title decade: finish high enough to matter in the spring, and take something from the derby.