Lokomotíva Košice

Lokomotíva Košice sit in the lower tiers of Slovak football now. The team traces back to 1946, when railway workers in Košice formed ŠK Železničiari, and for the next half-century the club kept changing shape along with the institutions that fed it — a merger with Sparta Košice the same year, another with the steelworks side VSŽ Košice in the 1960s, a run under the Lokomotíva name from 1952 that finally stuck as ŠK Železničiari and its successors folded into it. Then in 1998, relegation broke that chain: the senior team was moved out to Krompachy, and Lokomotíva as a Košice club effectively stopped existing before being rebuilt from scratch in the city. The best of it came in the late 1970s. The Czechoslovak Cup was won twice, in 1977 and 1979, and a third-place league finish in 1977-78 opened the door to Europe, where Lokomotíva faced Milan in the UEFA Cup. A Slovak Cup followed in 1985. Ján Kozák played through much of that spell, across two separate stints in blue and white, before going on to manage the Slovak national team — the kind of link that still gets mentioned when the club's history comes up. The rivalry with MFK Košice, born from the old VSS Košice, is still called the Košice Derby, even with the two clubs now sitting at very different levels of the game. Matches are played at Štadión Lokomotívy in the Čermeľ valley, built starting in 1947 and opened in 1959. It holds 10,787.