Union Berlin

The 1923 German championship final ended with Hamburg putting three past a team that, a decade earlier, had been founded to give the working men of Oberschöneweide a club of their own. That club, SC Union 06, lost 0:3, but the run to a national final was the kind of thing a factory district in the east of Berlin didn't forget, even after the war took the club apart and left it to be rebuilt twice over, first as SG Oberschöneweide, then as SG Union Oberschöneweide.

The name it carries now, 1. FC Union Berlin, was not a continuation but a fresh start ordered from above: in January 1966, officials from East Germany's ruling party, among them Herbert Warnke and Paul Verner, set up the club as a workers' side for the eastern half of the city. Two years later Union had its first and, for decades, only trophy of note, the FDGB-Pokal of 1968, lifted under captain Ulrich Prüfke. There was little else to show for the years that followed, other than a reputation among East Berliners for standing apart from BFC Dynamo, the club patronised by the Stasi, and for turning that rivalry into something closer to identity than sport.

Since reunification, the honours have come from lower down the pyramid: five Berlin cup wins spread from 1947 to 2009, an Intertoto Cup in 1986, promotion out of the 3. Liga as champions in 2009, and a run to the DFB-Pokal final in 2001 that Union lost. None of it matches Hertha BSC for weight of silverware, which is exactly why the Berlin derby between the two carries the charge it does.

None of it, either, has moved the club away from the Stadion An der Alten Försterei, tucked into the forest at Köpenick, where 22,012 people in red and white still fit into a ground that has always felt built by its own supporters rather than for them.