Heimstetten

The play-off route into Regionalliga Bayern in 2012 remains the only time a Bayernliga side has forced its way up that way, and the group of players who managed it is still how the club tends to come up whenever people talk about the fifth and sixth tiers of Bavarian football.

That promotion followed years of climbing: from the Bezirksliga in the early 1990s up through the Landesliga, where Heimstetten took the title twice, in 2005/06 and again in 2009/10, with a spell in the Oberliga Bayern in between that ended in relegation in 2008. The Regionalliga breakthrough of 2012 did not last either — the club went down again in 2015 — and it took a Bayernliga Süd championship in 2017/18 to force a way back up, where Heimstetten settled into the lower half of the table through to 2022.

The club was founded on 1 January 1967 in Heimstetten, a district of the municipality of Kirchheim bei München in Bavaria, and plays in red and white. Its sharpest local fixture is against FC Ismaning, a meeting the Bayernliga itself now markets as a derby; the two league meetings last season produced a 1-1 draw and a 3-0 win for Heimstetten, in a campaign that ended with the club seventh in Bayernliga Süd.

Home games are played at the Sportpark Heimstetten, a ground holding around 2,500, in the small Bavarian town that gave the club its name.