Portsmouth FC

Portsmouth's earliest matches were played by a group of local footballers before the club took formal shape on 5 April 1898, and a year later it settled at Fratton Park, the ground it has never left. The stadium now holds 20,867, a fraction of what it once did, but the shirt has stayed recognisable across the decades: blue, with white shorts and, since 1947, red socks — added on the suggestion of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, in memory of the soldiers of the British Army.

The best of Pompey's football came in a short burst either side of 1950. The club took the First Division title in 1948–49 and again the following season, back-to-back championships that remain the high point of its history. The FA Cup came twice, decades apart — beating Wolverhampton Wanderers 4–1 in 1939, then Cardiff City 1–0 in 2008, with Nwankwo Kanu scoring the only goal. Between those two dates lay years far removed from silverware.

Ownership turned the club's fortunes over more than once. Portsmouth went into administration for the second time in three years in November 2011, under Vladimir Antonov, and started the following season on a 10-point deduction that sent it down to League Two. It took until April 2013 for the crisis to end, when the Pompey Supporters' Trust bought the club outright and pulled it back from liquidation, later restructuring it as Portsmouth Community Football Club. Recovery from the bottom tier was slow but real: League Two in 2016–17, the EFL Trophy in 2019 on penalties against Sunderland, and League One in 2023–24.

No one wore the shirt longer than Jimmy Dickinson, who played more than 800 matches between 1946 and 1965 and was on the pitch for both title-winning seasons. Peter Harris still holds the club's scoring record from the same era, with 211 goals in 515 appearances, but it is Dickinson's name that Fratton Park still reaches for first.