HNK Hajduk Split

On 7 May 1944, on the Adriatic island of Vis, a group of players reformed a football club that no longer had a city to play in. Split was under occupation, and Hajduk had refused to take the field under any of the wartime regimes that controlled it. The side that reappeared on Vis wore the shirt under the name Hajduk NOVJ, and went on to play matches in North Africa and Italy before the war ended — a football club operating, in effect, as a unit of an army in exile.

The club had been founded in a different kind of exile 33 years earlier, on 13 February 1911, when a group of Split students registered it at the pub U Fleků. Between 1929 and 1935, the royal dictatorship in Belgrade forced a name change, striking "Croatian" from the title; after 1945 the new socialist authorities did much the same, and the club played simply as NK Hajduk until 1990, when it restored the chequered badge, and 1991, when independence brought back the full name Hrvatski nogometni klub Hajduk Split.

Since 1979 the home has been Poljud, built over two years and holding just under 34,000 — a stadium whose curved roofline is often likened to a seashell, fitting for a club nicknamed Bili, the Whites. Frane Matošić remains its defining figure on the pitch, 309 goals across a career that ran through the Yugoslav era, when Hajduk won the title nine times. Since Croatian independence there have been six championships, all of them between 1992 and 2005, plus Cup wins as recently as 2022 and 2023.

The rivalry with Dinamo Zagreb, the Eternal Derby, still frames each season more than any fixture list. What it has not produced is a league title since 2004/05 — Hajduk's longest wait since Croatia became independent, and one the Cup wins have yet to answer.