Hammarby FF

Long before anyone kicked a ball at Hammarby, there were oars in the water. A group of Stockholmers formed a rowing association by the lake in the southern district in 1889, and only in 1897 did the club take the name Hammarby IF. Football did not arrive as its own section until 1915, and even the founding date carried an asterisk: for decades the club dated itself to 1897, and it was only in May 2022 that Hammarby formally moved its official birth year back to that original rowing club, 1889.

The team's early decades in Allsvenskan read like a ledger of promotions and relegations. Hammarby made its top-flight debut in 1924/25 and went straight back down, dropped as far as the fourth tier by 1946/47, and spent much of the 1950s and 1960s bouncing between divisions. A run of 19 consecutive seasons from 1970 followed, crowned by a runners-up finish in 1982, before relegation in 1988 was answered within a year — a swift return remembered at the club as the Miracle of Karlstad — only for the side to go down again in 1990.

Money proved harder to fix than form. The club came close to bankruptcy in the early 1990s, delayed players' wages in 2008 while weighing a sale of AEG's stake, and dropped into Superettan in 2010 under renewed threat of insolvency. Promotion back to Allsvenskan came in 2014.

Green and white have been the colours since 1978; the black and yellow worn before it survives now as the away kit. The single league championship arrived in 2001; the only Swedish Cup followed in 2020/21. Kennedy Bakırcıoğlu, part of that 2001 championship side, remains the only Hammarby player whose shirt number, 10, has been retired. Hammarby Fotboll AB is majority owned by the club's members, with AEG and Zlatan Ibrahimović holding the rest.

Through the drops and the near-collapses, Kennet Olsson kept turning out for Hammarby. He retired with 396 appearances, still the club record.