Hünfelder SV

Hünfeld sits in the Rhön hills of eastern Hesse, a small town where the local football club has long carried the district's name into the wider game. Hünfelder SV did not simply appear: it grew out of the collapse of an earlier club, Turn- und Sportverein Fortuna, which had folded during the First World War. In its place, a group of enthusiasts placed an advertisement in the local paper, the Hünfelder Kreisblatt, and on 22 June 1919 the new club took shape.

Its best-remembered season came in 1963, when Hünfelder SV won the Hessenpokal, beating Eintracht Stadtallendorf 2:1 in the final. The win did more than fill the trophy cabinet: it sent the club into the DFB-Pokal, a stage far removed from its usual regional football. Two league titles in the Landesliga Hessen-Nord, in 1968 and again in 2003, mark the other high points of a club that has spent most of its history in the middle tiers of the Hessian pyramid, with a further championship in the Verbandsliga Hessen-Nord in 2012.

The team plays in blue and white, though the club's athletics section, run under the same roof, wears green and black instead. Matches are held at the Rhönkampfbahn, a 3,000-capacity ground with a running track and floodlights around its artificial pitch — a reminder that the club has always shared its home with other sports rather than standing apart from them.

What began as a newspaper notice, calling Hünfeld's sportsmen to rebuild something lost to the war, is still the club playing under that name in the Rhön today.