Butel Skopje

Butel is a Skopje municipality, not a separate town, and until 2017 it had no senior handball side of its own — the top clubs in the city were Vardar and Metalurg. RK Butel Skopje changed that, formed in August of that year and promoted to the Super League at the first attempt, having won the Second Division in its debut 2017/18 season.

The rise did not stop at promotion. By 2021/22 Butel had reached third place in the Super League, and its games against Vardar 1961 and Alkaloid carry the label of a Skopje derby, played out in front of the roughly 500 spectators the Andon Dimitrov Hall holds. In Europe the club has gone as far as the second qualifying round of the EHF Cup, beating Ukraine's ZTR Zaporizhzhia at home in 2019 before losing the tie away, and it returned to continental competition as recently as 2025/26, when Luxembourg's HB Dudelange knocked it out of the EHF European Cup by a single goal on aggregate.

April 2022 marked the club in a different way: Denis Tot, a Croatian player on Butel's books, died during that season at the age of 28. The number 9 shirt is kept out of use for another reason — Marko Bozhinovski, a left wing who came through at the club in 2019/20 and 2020/21 and was a mainstay of North Macedonia's under-19 side, is the player Butel built that gesture around, and his name is the one people at the Andon Dimitrov Hall bring up first.