Písek

Third-tier football in South Bohemia settles into familiar territory this season: FC Písek sit fourth in Group A of the Bohemian Football League, the division the club has made its home since buying up a league licence from Cheb in 2008. There have been no national cups or top-flight titles to show for the years since, aside from one gap season in 2013/14 when the club sat out the league altogether — otherwise, it has been an uninterrupted run at this level.

None of that was in view on 7 June 1910, when the club was founded in the town of Písek as SK Písek, long before the Bohemian Football League existed in its current form. The town's ground, the Městský sportovní areál, holds 1,500 — small enough that the pitch has never had to carry more.

What Písek has produced, more than any trophy, is forwards who left for bigger clubs and kept scoring. Jan Říha came through here from the age of 15, stayed until 1937, and then moved to Sparta Prague, where he spent the next 13 years, won the Czechoslovak title five times and earned a place in the country's Club of League Marksmen. He played 22 times for Czechoslovakia and went to the 1938 World Cup. Emil Svoboda followed a similar path a generation later — out of Písek, through Plzeň, and on to Sparta, where a Czechoslovak championship in 1954 came with five caps for the national side; he later coached in Cyprus.

Locally, though, it is Jan Thorovský who is remembered as the club's own — born and raised in Písek's youth football, he went on to make 125 top-flight appearances for Teplice, scoring 18 goals, before further spells at Slovan Liberec and Baník Most.