Füssen

Ask Uli Hiemer about Füssen and the answer starts in New Jersey: he left the club in 1984 to become the first German to play regularly in the NHL. That a small town in the Allgäu produced him is the point. The rink at Am Eisstadion 1 seats fewer than 4,000, and yet through the 1950s and 1960s it was the address of German hockey.

Seven championships in a row, 1953 to 1959, remain a record no club since has matched. Markus Egen was on the ice for most of it, at the club from 1946 to 1961, turning down the Montreal Canadiens to stay and finishing with 13 titles. Xaver Unsinn played alongside him in those years and later carried what he learned into coaching the national team. Between them, Füssen collected sixteen German championships, the last in 1973, and two Spengler Cups.

The club that won those titles no longer technically exists. The original Eissportverein, founded in December 1922, went bankrupt in 1983; its successor folded again in 2015. The Leopards nickname survived all of it.

What has not survived is the standing. Füssen once measured itself against the biggest names in the German game; now the derby that matters is local, against ESV Kaufbeuren in the Ostallgäu, with ECDC Memmingen supplying the wider Allgäu rivalry. Both are reminders of how much smaller the map has become since the 1950s, even if the rink at Kobelhang has not moved.