Zlín II

Nobody at Stadion Letná talks about FC Zlín II in terms of results. The reserve side exists so that a teenager who trains at Zlín's academy has somewhere to play regular, physical men's football before a coach decides whether he belongs with the first team, and that handover is the whole point of the club.

The team has been switched off and on again by administrative decisions more than once. It was disbanded in 2017, when the Czech Football Association scrapped reserve-league football in favour of a national under-19 competition, the National Junior League. When that experiment ended, Zlín brought the reserve side back in 2019 and slotted it into the Moravian-Silesian Football League, the third tier, where it has played since.

The rules there are not the same as for a normal club. A Czech reserve team cannot be promoted into the second tier, however well it finishes the season, and it plays no part in the Czech Cup. It shares Stadion Letná, capacity just over 6,300, with the senior side, and it shares the yellow and blue that give Zlín supporters their nickname, Ševci — the Cobblers, a name that goes back to the city's shoemaking trade and the Baťa company. None of that history is really the reserve team's own; the cup Zlín won in 2016–17 and the National Football League title from 2024–25 belong to the players who graduated out of sides like this one, not to the team itself.

There is no local rivalry attached to FC Zlín II in the way Zlín's first team has its derby with 1. FC Slovácko. In the MSFL it simply meets the other clubs' second strings, Baník Ostrava II and Slovácko II among them, in matches that matter for form and fitness rather than for any prize the reserve side could lift on its own.