AEK Athens FC

The meeting took place in a sports shop on Veranzerou Street, run by the Ionas brothers, and the name itself carries the memory of the lost city: an abbreviation of the Athletic Union of Constantinople.

That origin still shapes AEK's rivalries.

The club's record reads as fourteen Greek championships and sixteen Greek Cups, but the shape of it matters more than the count. A run to the UEFA Cup semi-final in 1976–77 made AEK the first Greek side to reach that stage of a European competition, and in 2002–03 it went through a Champions League group unbeaten, drawing all six matches. The 1990s, under Dušan Bajević, brought four championships and three cups. Then came the fall: relegated to the Greek third division in 2012–13 after debts and crowd-related sanctions, the club's lowest point in its history. Businessman Dimitris Melissanidis bought AEK the following year and promised both a return to the top flight and a new home ground; he sold the club on to shipowner Marios Iliopoulos in 2024. The championship returned in 2017–18, AEK's first since 1994, and in 2023 the club won the league and cup double for the first time since 1978.

Among the players who came through it, Thomas Mavros stands apart: still the all-time leading scorer in the Greek championship, with 260 goals, and later the club's president.

AEK have played since September 2022 at the AEK Arena – Gipedo Agia Sofia, built where the old Nikos Goumas stadium once stood before its demolition in 2003. It holds 32,500.