Hvězda Cheb

Two names sharpen every fixture at Stadion Lokomotiva: Františkovy Lázně, and Lokomotiva Cheb, whose ground the club now shares. Both meetings go by the same shorthand in the town, derby pro Cheb.

The club that plays under that name today is not the one that took the field in 1951 as VSJ Sokolovo Cheb. It passed through Rudá Hvězda, then Dukla Hraničář under the border guards, then back to Rudá Hvězda, then Union Cheb, before going bankrupt in 1996. A successor side, Union Cheb 2001, picked up the threads and took the name Hvězda in 2011, along with the old nickname, the Star, and the blue-and-white colours.

What that lineage left behind is a run of players who came through as conscripts and academy trainees rather than local products: Jozef Chovanec, who went on to Bayern Munich; Pavel Kuka, capped for the Czech Republic after spells at Bayer Leverkusen and Borussia Dortmund; Jaroslav Šilhavý, now in charge of the national team. Closer to home, the sharpest memory belongs to the autumn of 1990–91, when Dušan Uhrin Sr. had the side, then still Union Cheb, top of the table at the winter break.

The stadium tells its own version of that shrinking scale. The original Lokomotiva, built in 1952, held 15,000 people; it came down in 2017, and what stands there now takes 2,500.