Trepça Mitrovicë

Riza Lushta was still a teenager when he left Trepça's own academy for Italy. Workers from the Trepça mine formed the side, named it after the pit, and dressed it in green and black, colours that stuck with the nickname Xehetarët — the Miners.

A year later it went further still, reaching the final of the Marshal Tito Cup, where Rijeka beat them. Rexhep Xhaka was already a fixture in that team.

1989 broke the club apart. Albanian players left, the squad turned largely Serbian, and by 1991 Trepça had exited the Yugoslav football system altogether. What followed was a split into two clubs sharing one name: a Serbian side that moved to the northern part of Mitrovica and kept playing in the Yugoslav and Serbian leagues, and the Albanian KF Trepça, which stayed in the south and joined Kosovo's Independent League. The war settled the arrangement in 1999, fixing KF Trepça on the southern side of the divided city.

The club took the Kosovo Cup in 1992, playing out of the Adem Jashari Olympic Stadium, now under reconstruction.