Volos NFC

Two seasons, two promotions. Volos NFC won the Gamma Ethniki in 2017/18, then took the Football League title the following year, and by the summer of 2019 a club that had not existed two years earlier was preparing for Super League 1 football. It has stayed there since.

The point of the exercise was never the trophies. Volos, a port city on the Pagasetic Gulf, had been without a top-flight side, and the answer was a merger: Taxa and Petros Kitros folded into one another on 2 June 2017 to put the city back on the national map. The name says as much — Volos New Football Club, with the "new" doing real work.

Home is the Panthessaliko Stadium, which was not built for this. It went up for the football tournament of the 2004 Olympics, on the edge of the city, and for years it was a large bowl in search of a regular tenant. Volos NFC gave it one. A third-division side inherited a ground designed for Olympic crowds, and the gap between the fixture list and the architecture took a while to close.

The club plays in cyan and red — hence The Cyan-Reds, the nickname that travelled with them up the divisions.

Nothing about the ascent was gradual. The Gamma Ethniki campaign delivered promotion at the first attempt, the Football League campaign did the same, and the club arrived in the top flight without ever having spent a season consolidating. Whatever was learned about Super League football was learned in the Super League itself.

The stadium holds 22,700.