AFC Amsterdam

In 1995, to mark a hundred years since a handful of Amsterdam teenagers had gathered in a basement to start a football club, AFC Amsterdam played a friendly against Barcelona, managed at the time by Johan Cruyff. It was an odd pairing on paper — a side from a modest sports park in the south of the city standing across from one of the biggest clubs in Europe — but it fit a team that has spent most of its life quietly outlasting bigger names.

The club was founded on 18 January 1895, when six boys of fifteen and sixteen met in a basement on Koninginneweg, among them Gerard Schipens and Hein Brass. That makes AFC the oldest football club still active in the Netherlands, five years ahead of Ajax, and unlike many Dutch sides of that era it has never merged with another club or changed its name.

Its red and black colours were fixed on 8 October 1896, taken from the city of Amsterdam itself, and gave the team its nickname, The Reds. The early kit paired a red shirt marked with a black V against black shorts and red socks.

The championships came in bursts, spread across the era before a single national league existed and after it: 1906, 1909, 1917 to 1919, then a long gap to 1946, a run through the 1960s, and returns in 2001, 2010, 2014 and 2019, fourteen titles in all. The club now plays in the Tweede Divisie, the third tier of Dutch football, at Sportpark Goed Genoeg, which holds around 3,000.

Its youth academy has sent more than thirty-five players into the professional game, and none travelled further than Dayley Blind, who went from AFC's youth ranks to Manchester United.