Pardubice

Marek Kulíček spent his playing days chasing goals across the Czech top flight before he came back to Pardubice to coach. That lineage is patched together rather than continuous: FK Pardubice a.s. was formed in 2008 out of a merger of three local sides, FK Tesla Pardubice, FK Junior Pardubice and MFK Pardubice, and the club counts its history from that year rather than reaching further back.

Promotion has come once, in 2019–20, when the club won the second tier and went up to the top division. The Czech Cup has been kinder in spurts than in sustained runs — the last sixteen, reached in 2015–16 among other seasons, is as far as the team has gone. There has been no European football and no domestic Super Cup.

None of that carries the heat of a fixture in Chrudim or Hradec Králové.

Home games are played at the Arnošt Košťál Stadium, a protected piece of architecture that spent 2021 to 2023 under reconstruction: the main stand restored, new covered terraces built, floodlights and undersoil heating installed, all of it required to meet top-flight standards. It reopened in February 2023, briefly traded its old name for a sponsor's before reverting, and now holds 4,620 seated supporters in black and white.