Brønderslev

Jakob Ahlmann was seven when he started in the youth section at Brønderslev IF, and thirteen when Aalborg's academy took him. Nine years on the pitches off Gl. Agdrupvej — that is what the club does now, and has done for most of its life: it finds boys in a North Jutland market town of a few thousand and hands them on.

The club came out of the town's own athletics association, formed in 1897, when Brønderslev was a railway stop growing into something larger. Football was one section among several, and the name has stayed that way ever since — an idrætsforening, a sports club, not a football company.

The one season people still bring up is 1964/65. In the Danish Cup, Brønderslev beat AaB and then KB — Copenhagen's oldest club — before going out in the third round. That autumn in the league the club sat tenth in the Kvalifikationsturneringen, the fourth tier at the time. Two of the biggest names in Danish football, knocked out by a side four levels down, in the space of a few weeks. Nothing since has come close.

Home is the BI-Centeret, carrying the sponsor's name Arena Kop & Kande. It holds 2,000, of which 180 are seats — the rest stand, or lean on the rail, and on a cold Jutland evening most of them do neither and go inside. The black and white has not changed.

There is no derby with a settled name. That is the geography: Aalborg is the club everyone in the region measures themselves against, and Brønderslev's measurement was taken once, in a cup tie sixty years ago, and has not needed repeating.