B71

B71 come into this season out of the Foroy Bjor Meistaradeildin and back among the clubs from Sandoy trying to hold their place in the Faroese top flight — the island's smallest catchment against clubs drawing on Torshavn and Klaksvik.

Football on Sandoy took shape once the island's central school built a pitch in the late 1960s, and the team that formed around it played its first matches as Sand, a name that fit a squad drawn entirely from the town. A year after the club's founding on 1 January 1970, players started arriving from Skopun, Skalavik and Husavik, and the name changed to B71 to match a roster that no longer belonged to one village.

The one title still spoken of is 1989: promoted into the top division, B71 won it at the first attempt without losing a match, finishing on 31 points to runners-up HB Torshavn's 22, under Polish coach Jan Kaczynski. Four years later the club beat HB again, 2-1 in a replay after a 1-1 draw, to take the Faroese Cup — a rare win over a club that had denied B71 the same trophy in the 1989 final.

Pall a Reinatugvu ran midfield through both of those years, 224 appearances and 55 goals across a career that started in 1987 and ended in 2003, and it was his goal against APOEL in 1996 Champions League qualifying that put a Sandoy team on a continental scoresheet. He later became Speaker of the Logting and a health minister. Eli Hentze played alongside him from 1986 and stayed on the pitch until 2011, scored against APOEL the same year, and came back afterwards as head coach.

Home games are played at Inni i Dal in Sandur, a ground with room for well under two thousand. The rivalry that matters most runs to Torshavn: HB has beaten B71 to one final and lost another to them, and the two sides' meetings carry that history whenever they're drawn together.