Hvidovre

West of Copenhagen, a group of local sportsmen wanted the suburb of Hvidovre to have a football club of its own, built from nothing rather than grafted onto an older society — and it has stayed that way ever since, with no merger and no renaming to complicate the record. Hvidovre Idrætsforening was entered in the books on 15 October 1925, and supporters have called the team De gamle kæmper, the Old Giants, for most of the decades since.

The club's best football came in a compressed spell either side of 1970: Danish champions in 1966, again in 1973, and once more in 1981, a run no suburban club so close to Copenhagen's grander names has matched. The one cup to go with those titles arrived in the 1979/80 final, a 5-3 win over Lyngby in which the Polish forward Tadeusz Gapiński scored — enough, on its own, to make him a fixture in the club's telling of that season ever since.

Of the players who came up through Hvidovre, one name travelled furthest: Peter Schmeichel began his professional career here in 1984, years before Manchester United and the Denmark goal became his address.

The nearest and sharpest rivalry belongs to Brøndby IF, the other club of Copenhagen's western suburbs — meetings between them are still billed as the Vestegnsderby.

Hvidovre Stadion holds 12,000, and fewer than half of those places, 4,600 to 4,800, are seats.