AFC Stoneham

Down the road in Eastleigh sits Hamble Club. The rivalry outlasts most of what the club has called itself: it started life as Royal Engineers (Ordnance Survey Office) FC in 1919, raised by soldiers back from the First World War who worked together at the Ordnance Survey Office. A short-lived merger with a Post Office side in 1923 produced Southampton Civil Service FC for a single season before the club broke away again, and by 1929 the name had settled to the plainer Ordnance Survey FC.

The move that reshaped it came much later. The club runs a large number of teams.

Purple has stuck as the shorthand for all of it. The nickname "The Purples" comes straight from the shirts, shorts and socks. Their ground, the Stoneham Lane Football Complex, holds around 1,000, with a single covered stand seating roughly 150.

The 2025–26 season stands apart : the Wessex League Premier Division title arrived alongside the FA Vase, the club's most significant honour to date, following a Hampshire Senior Cup win the year before. Set against that run, the decades under the Ordnance Survey name — county and Southampton league titles picked up through the 1980s and 1990s — read as the long apprenticeship before it. What still eludes the club is a step beyond this level: no professional academy graduate has yet come out of Stoneham to make a name elsewhere.