Zeta

Stadion Trešnjica holds 3,000 people, a ground for a club whose home town, Golubovci, sits just outside Podgorica as the seat of the Zeta municipality. The name on the terraces changed before the ground did: the club started life in 1927 as Danica and only became Zeta in 1955.

What Zeta did with a small-town budget was win the league Montenegro had never had before. When the country split its football off from Serbia, Zeta took the inaugural Prva Crnogorska Liga in 2006/07, becoming the first champion of an independent Montenegro. A second-place finish followed the next season, and the club came second again in 2016/17. Before independence, playing in the old Serbia and Montenegro top flight, Zeta had already finished third in 2004/05. In Europe, the club's best run came in 2012/13, when it got past Sarajevo in the Europa League play-off round.

Golubovci's ground has also served as a proving stage rather than an endpoint. Zeta has built a name as a source of players for the Montenegro national team, sending talent through its ranks and out again rather than keeping a settled squad for long. Domestically, the honours from the club's earlier, Yugoslav-era existence still sit in the cabinet alongside the 2007 league title: the Montenegrin Cup, won in 1999 and again in 2000, and the Second League of the SFRY title from 2000.

Rivalries with the likes of Grbalj, Rudar and Igalo have never hardened into anything fixed; Zeta's identity has stayed tied to Golubovci and to that one championship season rather than to a running feud. The club now carries the weight of being the league's first champion into a competitive field that has grown since 2007, with Podgorica-area rivals pushing for the same silverware Zeta claimed first.