Husqvarna

Husqvarna FF sit in the lower tiers of Swedish football these days.

The club exists because two older sides in the same town decided to stop competing with each other. In February 1987, the men's football sections of Husqvarna IF and Huskvarna Södra IS merged, and the new club kept the blue and white that had belonged to Husqvarna IF. There was no need to invent a nickname afterwards.

Vapenvallen has hosted the club's matches since before either predecessor existed as HFF, having opened in 1912. It went through renovation work in 2014, in the aftermath of that promotion, and now holds around 5,000 when standing room is counted in. Local derbies against Jönköpings Södra draw the town's attention, but the fixture with real weight is the one against Öster — the Smålandsderbyt, a name that carries the whole province rather than just two clubs.

Besides 2013, the honours board shows Division 2 Östra Götaland championships in 1998 and 2012, the kind of results that mark a club working its way up rather than defending a place at the top.

Alan Kennedy arrived in 1987, the year of the merger itself, already a European Cup winner with Liverpool. For a newly formed club in Huskvarna, signing a player who had scored in a European Cup final was not the sort of thing that happened by accident, and it is still what people bring up first when the early years of HFF come up.