FC Gifu

The Nagaragawa runs past the stadium that gave FC Gifu its ground.

The club itself grew out of a company side. When Seino Transportation's works team folded in January 1998, Masayuki Katsuno, who had managed it to the end, helped start a new club three years later, in April 2001, and took charge of it himself. The Gifu Prefectural league in 2002 and 2003, the Tōkai Soccer League in 2006, and then third place in the Japan Football League in 2007, which carried them into J2.

None of that has produced a national title. What FC Gifu can point to instead are prefectural ones — the Emperor's Cup's Gifu qualifiers, won six times between 2006 and 2024, most recently in successive years from 2021 to 2024, a stretch that has done more to define the club lately than anything in the national league table. Zweigen Kanazawa provides the fixture that matters most to supporters, played out as the Haku-san derby.