Sabadell

Founded on 11 December 1903, the football club that carries its name has spent most of its life measuring itself against the city it comes from rather than against the capital down the road.

The best years came in the 1940s. Sabadell won the Second Division in 1941–42 and again in 1945–46, and either side of that took the Mediterranean Cup in 1944. The 1935 Spanish Cup final belongs to the decade before: Sevilla won it 3–0, and the club has not been back to that stage since.

What followed was a long pattern of falling and climbing. Four Fourth Division titles — 1931–32, 1963–64, 1976–77, 1993–94 — mark the low points as clearly as they mark the recoveries, and the Third Division wins in 1983–84 and 2010–11 did the same job a rung higher. In between, in 1999–2000, the club beat Elche's reserves to take the Spanish Federation Cup.

Home is the Nova Creu Alta, which holds 11,908 after its most recent rebuild — a figure that puts the ground closer to the town's scale than to the divisions the club has occasionally reached.

The rivalries are regional and old. Sabadell won the Catalan championship in 1933–34, and its list of honours from 1913 onwards is thick with Catalan titles across every category; those competitions set the neighbours it still measures itself against, and the history between them adds an edge that a league table does not explain.