Ilirija

Ljubljana counts its senior clubs by whether they made it through the twentieth century intact, and Ilirija is one of the few that did. The club took its name in 1911 and folded in a smaller side called Hermes two years later.

The harder test came later. Money trouble in 1936 pushed Ilirija into a merger with Primorje. Ilirija itself did not return until 1950, brought back by men who had played for it before the fighting started.

Its strongest years sit either side of that gap. Through the 1920s and into the mid-1930s, Ilirija won the Ljubljana Subassociation League twelve times and took the regional cup three years running from 1926. A runners-up finish in the Yugoslav Amateur Championship in 1972 came close. The best-known name from the earlier period is Stanko Tavčar, the first Slovenian called up for the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, who played for the national side in the early 1920s and went to the Antwerp Olympics in 1920.

Green and white are the club's colours now, and "Stara dama" — the old lady — is what people call it, though for a stretch in its early years the shirts were red and white with a star, a nod to Slavia Prague.