Metta / LU

Metta start the 2026 season back in the Latvian 1. Liga. Tenth and last place in the Virsliga in 2025 sent them down.

The club moves into the new season with somewhere settled to play. Before the campaign began, Metta opened Futbola centrs Rūpnīca on Sāremas iela in Sarkandaugava, built over the demolished Energoautomātika ground. The Hanza secondary school pitch, then Daugava Stadium from June 2018, then Daugava again in the summer of 2024, then Hanza and the Sloka ground out in Jūrmala across the 2025 season.

The football school had been sending teams to youth tournaments since 2000. A year later it joined forces with the University of Latvia, which is where the second half of the name came from; that partnership ran out in 2019 and the club went back to FK Metta.

What the club has been known for is the age of the people it puts on the pitch. In 2020 Metta were identified as the youngest side in any of Europe's top divisions, with an average age of 19.5.

The name most often attached to all of this is Raimonds Krollis . The forward came through the whole of the Metta academy and made his Latvia debut in September 2020 — the first player to travel that entire route from the club's youth set-up to the senior national side.