Berliner

Rugby in Berlin has never been a mass sport, and for most of a century one club has carried the weight of keeping it alive in the capital: Berliner RC, founded in 1926 and set to mark its centenary in 2026. The club plays in the 1. Bundesliga, German rugby's top flight, and has done so through relegation and quick returns rather than sustained dominance — dropping down in 2000 and coming straight back up the following year, then surviving a league reform in 2012 that widened the Bundesliga around it.

Berliner RC has never lifted the German Championship or the DRV-Pokal, and its history reads instead as a string of near misses: runner-up in the championship in 1989, when TSV Victoria Linden won 20–6, and beaten twice in cup finals in the 1980s, by DSV 1878 Hannover in 1983 and by SC Neuenheim in 1988. A national sevens title arrived in 2006.

The fixture that matters most in Berlin is not against a club from elsewhere but across town, against Rugby Klub 03 Berlin — the Berliner Derby.

Among those who have wide the colours, Colin Grzanna stands out beyond the caps he won: a surgeon by profession who also played rugby in South Africa before returning to captain the side he came up through. The club has trained since the 2010s at its ground on Sachtlebenstraße, having left the Sportanlage Jungfernheide, and once drew up plans for a 1,000-seat stadium that never left the drawing board.