Middlesbrough

Steve Gibson was still a boy from the town when Middlesbrough F.C. collapsed in 1986, the original company wound up under its debts. He was the one who put together the consortium that registered a new company that summer and kept the shirt on the pitch — a rescue that later paid for the move to Riverside Stadium, now holding 33,746 after redevelopment work in 2016.

The club he saved had started as a cricket club's winter pastime. Members of Middlesbrough Cricket Club formed the football side on 20 October 1876 and stayed amateur for over a decade, long enough to win the FA Amateur Cup twice in the 1890s. Professionalism split the town rather than united it: a breakaway group left in 1889 to found Middlesbrough Ironopolis, and an attempted merger of the two clubs in 1892 fell apart within months. Middlesbrough itself did not turn professional until 1899, when it joined the Second Division — a division it would top three times over the following decades.

The one trophy the club has never had to qualify with an asterisk came in 2004, when Middlesbrough beat Bolton Wanderers 2–1 to win the League Cup. It sits alongside a run of finals lost rather than won — an FA Cup final against Chelsea in 1997, a League Cup final the same year settled by replay against Leicester, and a UEFA Cup final in 2006 in which Sevilla won 4–0. The Boro, as the club is known locally, draw their support from a fanbase nicknamed the Smoggies, after the steelworks that once defined the town's skyline.

None of it carries the weight of the fixture with Newcastle United. The Tyne–Tees derby is the one that decides bragging rights on Teesside, with Sunderland supplying the second rivalry, the Tees–Wear derby, a notch below it in intensity but no less bitterly contested when the two meet.