Tempo Praha

Antonín Kinský grew up on the pitch at Ve Lhotce before Tottenham Hotspur ever knew his name, one of a run of academy graduates who passed through FC Tempo Praha on their way to Sparta Prague, Hradec Králové or Slovan Liberec. The club has built that reputation quietly, from a district youth setup that in the late 1980s won the Prague Championship and sent its own age-group side into the national youth league.

The team itself has spent most of its life outside the spotlight, an amateur side from the Lhotka and Modřany part of Prague 4 known locally as the Tempáci. What passes for silverware has come in the lower rungs of Prague football: the I.A Třída group three times, the I.B Třída twice, and a first taste of something bigger in 2023/24, when a second-place finish in the Pražský přebor lifted the club into the Czech Fourth Division.

Locally, none of that matters as much as the meetings with SK Újezd Praha 4, a fixture reporters in the district still call an emotional derby.

None of it began as FC Tempo Praha at all. The side started out in 1928 as S.K. Lhotka, formed by football enthusiasts in the district, and spent the decades that followed being renamed with each shift in the country around it — Olympia Praha XV, then Lhotka again, then A.F.K. Zátiší, then Sokol Lhotka after 1948. Only in 1978, folded into a district sports association as TJ Tempo Praha, did the name that stuck begin to take shape.