Rychnov N. Kneznou

Post-1989 Czech football restructured hundreds of state sports clubs, and the Rychnov side re-emerged from that shake-up in 1991, taking on the Spartak name and the ground its predecessor, TJ Spartak, had already used for decades. That predecessor was fielding teams by 1969, so the current club inherited a pitch and a support base rather than starting from nothing.

Spartak has stayed a regional club through all of it, currently playing in the Královéhradecký krajský přebor, the fifth tier, with no promotion to the national divisions on record. The closest it came to wider attention was the 1997/98 Czech Cup, when it knocked out FK Pardubice in the preliminary round and then beat FK Pardubice 1899 in the first round — two results against sides from a considerably higher level than Rychnov itself occupies.

What the club has produced more reliably than results is players. Its academy sent Tomáš Petrášek into a career that ran through Legia Warsaw and Jeonbuk Hyundai Motors, and goalkeeper Tomáš Holý moved on to Ipswich Town and Sparta Prague — both departures the kind a fifth-tier club measures its youth work by.

Locally, the season is built around the derby with FK Rojek Kostelec nad Orlicí, and the closest thing to a trophy run has come in the regional Pohár hejtmana: Spartak beat TJ Dvůr Králové nad Labem 3:1 in the 2024/25 final, then reached the final again the following season. At the Hradec Králové regional football association's gala evening, the club was named the region's most-decorated for the year, with Roman Zajíček picking up the Best Player award for 2022/23.

None of that changes what the club was built to be in 1991: a regional side carrying forward a name and a stadium from the old TJ Spartak, playing in front of the same crowd on the same ground it always had.