Stilon Gorzów

Stilon Gorzów Wielkopolski go into this season as a lower-league side still working to rebuild the standing the club once had as GKP, when it reached the I liga in 2007/08. The current club, registered as KS Stilon in 2011 after its predecessor collapsed under financial problems, started again from the IV liga and has been climbing back through regional and national divisions since, adding championship seasons in III Liga and IV Liga along the way, most recently in 2017.

The name itself carries the weight of that rebuilding. Founded in 1947 as Jedwabnik, the club passed through Włókniarz and Unia before settling on ZKS Stilon in 1961, tying its identity to the synthetic-fibre plant that gave Gorzów Wielkopolski its industrial name. That first Stilon side reached the semi-finals of the Puchar Polski in 1992, a high point the club has not matched since the 1996 split that folded its football section into GKP and, ultimately, led to the 2011 refounding.

Paweł Kaczorowski and Ryszard Szpakowski went on to play for the Polish national team after coming through at Stilon, and their names still carry more locally than any of the coaches who have passed through since, Eugeniusz Ksol and Kazimierz Lisiewicz among those who stayed longest. The fixture that still matters most in Gorzów is against Warta Gorzów, the Gorzów Derby, sharpened by a rivalry that predates both clubs' modern reorganisations.

Home games are played in blue and white in front of a crowd fewer than a thousand strong on most weekends, at a ground with room for 5,000 on ul. Olimpijska that locals still call Stadion Stilonu. It sits inside a city better known these days for canoeing than football, which is exactly the crowd the Niebiesko-Biali are trying to win back.