Greuther Fürth U19

Five Bavarian U19 Cup wins tell most of what the Fürth academy has to show for itself, and four of them are recent: 2010, then 2015, then a run of three in a row from 2023 through 2026. The regional cup is the level at which this side wins things — the national DFB Junioren Pokal and the U19 Bundesliga have both stayed out of reach.

The seniors' green and white and the shamrock on the crest — the trefoil that gave the club its Kleeblätter nickname — reach down through the age groups, as does a founding date the youth side inherits rather than owns. SpVgg Fürth started in 1903 and took on TSV Vestenbergsgreuth in 1996, and the merged club kept the older year.

The U19s do not play at Sportpark Ronhof Thomas Sommer. Their ground is the Ertl-Erhard-Sportfeld, inside the Sportzentrum Kleeblatt, where 2,500 people can get in — a training-complex pitch rather than a stadium, which is the ordinary arrangement for German academy football and puts these matches in front of a few hundred at a time rather than a filled terrace.

What does draw a crowd is 1. FC Nürnberg. The Fränkisches Derby runs the whole way down both clubs, and the two cities sit close enough that a youth fixture between them is never treated as a youth fixture.

The academy's honours board is not matched by a list of graduates who went on to the first team. The best-known young players to wear the Fürth shirt in recent seasons arrived from elsewhere: Julian Green, who came to the club with a Germany cap already behind him, and Jamie Leweling, both developed in other academies before Fürth signed them.