IA Akranes

The tally is 18 league titles, and the shape of them matters more than the number. The first arrived in 1951, the last in 2001, and between 1992 and 1996 ÍA won five in a row. Nine Icelandic Cups sit alongside them, the last in 2003.

What Akranes exported was players. Ásgeir Sigurvinsson left for Standard Liège and then Stuttgart, and for a generation of Icelanders he was the proof that the thing was possible at all. Arnór Guðjohnsen came out of the same town and passed the trade to his son Eiður. Guðjón Þórðarson played 212 matches for the club and won five championships and five cups in the yellow shirt with its two black stripes before returning to the touchline as a manager.

Home is Akranesvöllur, carried now under the sponsor's name Elkem völlurinn. It holds 5,550, of which only 850 are seats — the rest stand, on a ground where the wind off the Atlantic has ruined many a passing game.

The fixtures that carry weight are the ones against the capital. KR, Valur and Víkingur are all Reykjavík clubs, and a town of Akranes's size beating them was never a neutral result. Keflavík, from the same western coast, is the other one. Some have tried to hang the name Snæfellsnes Derby on the Víkingur fixture, though Víkingur play in Reykjavík and the peninsula lies well to the north; the match has never settled on a name everyone uses.