Resovia Rzeszów

Resovia grew out of the townspeople — the schoolmasters, the clerks, the officer class of the pre-war Wojskowo-Cywilne Towarzystwo Sportowe — while Stal arrived in 1944 on the back of the factories and state backing.

Resovia merged with Spójnia to form Sparta in 1955. The old name came back and stayed, through the years that supporters count as the good ones.

Those years were the late 1970s and the 1980s. Resovia spent 17 seasons in the II liga between 1977 and 1994 and got within a place of the top flight in 1982/83, finishing second. The season before, they had reached the semi-finals of the Puchar Polski. That is as close as the football section has ever come — it has never played in the Ekstraklasa. The club returned to the second tier in 2020.

Home matches are played at the Stadion Miejski in Rzeszów, a ground of 12,000 that belongs, by name, to the other club in the derby. Resovia had its own stadium before that.

The supporters answer to several names. Pasy, the stripes, comes from the white and red of the shirt; Wojownicy Maltańscy is the one they chose for themselves, after the Knights of Malta. The first honours are older than the state that later renamed them — champions of the Lwów district in 1937, runners-up in 1933 and 1934.

The first recorded match was on 2 October 1910, against Wisłoka Dębica.