FC Koln

Wolfgang Overath never really left. He captained the side that won the league in 1964, lifted the World Cup with West Germany a decade later, and came back to run the club as president once his playing days were done — the kind of loop that tells you more about FC Köln than any honours table.

The club itself was stitched together on 13 February 1948, when Kölner Ballspiel-Club 1901 merged with SpVgg Sülz 07. It was a founding member of the Bundesliga in 1963 and won the German championship in 1962, 1964 and 1978, adding the DFB-Pokal four times along the way. In 1986 it went as far as a UEFA Cup final and lost to Real Madrid.

What has followed since is harder to sum up as a trophy list. Köln have gone down and come back up so often that supporters call it the "elevator years" — relegated in 1998, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2012, 2018 and 2024, and each time they answered by winning the second division outright rather than scraping through a play-off. Home matches are played at the RheinEnergieStadion, known as Müngersdorfer Stadion until 2001, in front of 50,000 for league games.

The nickname, Die Geißböcke, comes from Hennes, the live goat that has served as club mascot since the 1950s; fans themselves go by Effzeh, the local dialect's rendering of the initials FC. Lukas Podolski grew up through the academy here, Toni Schumacher set the club's appearance record in goal, and Pierre Littbarski won a World Cup in 1990 before Overath's old teammates and successors kept the presidency close to the dressing room. The rivalry with Borussia Mönchengladbach, the Rheinisches Derby, remains the fixture the city marks on the calendar before any other.

Köln go into the new season back in the Bundesliga after last term's promotion, aiming to hold their ground rather than begin the cycle again.