Apoel Nicosia

The Greeks of Nicosia wanted a club of their own, and in November 1926 they got one: a football side named for exactly that, ПОЭЛ — the Football Club of the Greeks of Nicosia. Two years later an athletics section opened and a letter was added to the front, and it has been APOEL ever since. The blue and yellow carry the same idea, Greece and Byzantium.

The first titles came quickly. Five championships in a row from 1935/36, and after the war three more on the trot. Then the club learned how the other half lives: a single title in the 1950s, another in 1964/65, long stretches with nothing.

The split of 1948 gave Cypriot football its loudest fixture. Those who left founded Omonia, and the two have been the Eternal Rivals since — though the older derby, against Anorthosis, predates the argument entirely.

Nothing in the club's history compares with the winter of 2011/12. APOEL knocked out Lyon in the last 16 of the Champions League — Gustavo Manduca scored the goal that settled it — and went out in the quarter-final. Under Ivan Jovanović that team was second to nothing at home in the GSP, where the club has played since October 1999.

What followed was stranger still. Under Paulo Sérgio and those who came after, APOEL won seven championships in succession, the run beginning with a treble in 2013/14. The twenty-ninth league title arrived in 2023/24.

But the name that outlasted football belongs to Andreas Michaelides, who played for the club and later served as mayor of Nicosia.