Vardar Negotino

Every meeting with GFK Tikvesh, from over the hills in Kavadarci, is billed locally as the Winegrowers' Derby, sometimes just the Tikvesh Derby, because both towns sit in the same Tikveš wine country and both clubs carry that inheritance into the fixture. Vardar Negotino's own supporters go by "Vinari" — winemakers — a name that has nothing to do with results and everything to do with what grows on the hills around Negotino.

The line back to 1938 runs through SD Tikvesh, founded a decade earlier, and through FK Mancho Malininov before the club settled on the name Vardar Negotino in 1952. None of that early history produced much silverware. The one campaign anyone still points to is 1977–78, when the side finished fifth in the Macedonian Republic League at a time when that competition was the top flight. Since then the club has mostly lived in the lower tiers, and after a spell in the Second League it dropped to the Third League South.

Sašo Krstev came up through the youth ranks here before moving on to FK Vardar Skopje and FK Pobeda and winning six caps for the national team; he later returned to Negotino as club president. For one season, 2021–22, the bench belonged to Petar Angelov, a name known in North Macedonia for handball rather than football, brought in to coach the first team.

Matches are played at the Cvaj Arena, a ground that holds 1,500, in black and white, in a town whose football club still answers to the name of what its people make from the grapes on the surrounding slopes.