Sparta Praha

Sparta's fiercest business in Prague is with Slavia — a derby with no love lost, contested by the city's two oldest clubs since before there was a Czechoslovakia to play in.

Domestically, Sparta has rarely had to look past that rivalry for measure. The club won the Czechoslovak championship 22 times between 1919 and 1993, then carried the habit into the new republic with 14 Czech titles, the most recent in 2024. Cups split along the same line — eight from the Czechoslovak era, eight since 1992. Further afield, the Mitropa Cup, taken in 1927, 1935 and 1964, is the one trophy from Sparta's international ambitions that actually came home; in UEFA competition the club has gone no further than a UEFA Cup quarter-final and a second Champions League group stage.

The ground has stood at Letná throughout, now sold under the name epet ARENA and holding 18,262. Blue, yellow and red, set down in the club's 1894 statutes, have never changed; the nickname Iron Sparta, Železná Sparta, attached itself in the 1920s and 1930s and outlasted everything that came after it.

What came after was five different names in seventeen years under communist rule — AC Sparta Bubeneč, Sokol Bratrství Sparta, Sparta ČKD Sokolovo, TJ Spartak Praha Sokolovo, TJ Sparta ČKD Praha — imposed between 1948 and 1965 on a club founded on 16 November 1893 as Athletic Club Královské Vinohrady and renamed Athletic Club Sparta the following August. AC Sparta Praha was not so much revived as taken back by the people who ran it, on 16 January 1991, two years before they turned the club into a joint-stock company and put the same name on the door for good.