Drita

Gjilan sits in Kosovo's Anamorava region, and football there has carried a political charge since before the club existed. Drita was formed in 1947 by members of the town's Albanian community, set up as a deliberate counterweight to Crvena Zvezda, the Serbian side already playing in the same streets. The authorities were not indifferent: the communist regime dissolved the club in 1952, and it took local activists until 1977 to bring it back.

The name that stuck to Drita says more about the town than the founding does. Supporters and journalists began calling the side Intelektualët — the Intellectuals — because its ranks over the years held writers, poets and politicians as often as footballers.

Silverware came late and then kept coming. Selami Osmani's side won the Kosovo Cup in 2000/01 and followed it with the club's first league title in 2002/03. The second arrived in 2017/18, when Drita went unbeaten through all 29 games of the season, and a third followed in 2019/20. Under Zekirija Ramadani the club added two more, in 2024/25 and 2025/26, and that last campaign carried Drita into the second qualifying round of the UEFA Champions League, a first for a club from Kosovo, before the run continued into the play-off stage of the Conference League.

None of it weighs as much locally as the fixture against Gjilani, a club that split away from Drita itself in 1995 and has sharpened into the fiercer rival since 2012. Drita's own following has organised as the Intelektualët since 1998, standing across from Gjilani's Skifterat in a derby that fills Gjilan City Stadium to something like 13,000–15,000. Cup finals between the two in Pristina have drawn crowds of up to 30,000.

Rebuilt to hold 9,500 in Drita's blue and white, the stadium is a far quieter place on an ordinary Sunday than it is when Gjilani come to town.