Varpalotai

The football club in Várpalota already had a quarter-century behind it when a handball section was added in 1952. Red and black, the colours chosen that year, still mark the team, and the nickname that followed the section into the decades, The Miners, has stuck longer than most of the results.

The club's best spell came without a single relegation attached to it: eleven straight seasons in the top-flight NB I between 1982 and 1993. Fourth place, reached twice, in 1985 and again in 1991/92, marked the ceiling of that era rather than any silverware, since the honours on record, an NB II title in 1974 and again in 1994/95, and an NB I/B championship in 1981, belong mostly to the seasons either side of the top flight run.

Gyula Gál wore the shirt through that entire top-division stretch, from 1986 to 1993, and it is his name the club's own hall now carries. The derbies against Komárom and against fellow miners' club Ajkai Bányász gave the calendar its sharpest fixtures.

Home games are played in front of no more than 150 people at the Gál Gyula Sportcsarnok, a reminder of how small the operation has stayed even after everything the 1980s side achieved. That scale is now the club's setting rather than its obstacle, and the task in front of the current squad is simply to keep the section going the way it has since 1952: producing handball in a town built for it, one season at a time.