Velež

Stadion Rođeni holds 7,000. The ground carries the same name as the team itself — Rođeni, "the born ones" — a title Velež did not choose lightly, and did not choose at all in 1922, when the club started life as a workers' sports society, RŠD Velež, founded on 26 June that year.

The original home, Bijeli Brijeg, was lost in 1992, when the outbreak of war in Bosnia put it under the control of Croat forces. That rupture sits at the centre of the club's history more than any trophy does: Velež had been the dominant force in Bosnian football under Yugoslavia, winning the Yugoslav Cup twice, in 1981 and 1986, and the Balkan Cup in 1981. It has never won the Bosnian championship itself — third place, in 2020/21 and again in 2023/24, is as close as it has come — though the Bosnian Cup did arrive in 2022.

Between those points came administrative collapse, twice, in 2003 and again in 2016, each time forcing the club down through the divisions before it worked its way back to the Premier League by 2019. Vahid Halilhodžić remains the name attached to the club's best football, 253 goals before he left for Nantes, where he was twice French football's top scorer. Dušan Bajević, the club's leading scorer in league matches with 144, went on to build a coaching career in Greece.

None of that carries the weight, locally, of the derby against HŠK Zrinjski, the other club in a city still split along the lines the war drew through it. The fixture is known simply as the Mostar derby, and it is Rođeni's crowd, packed into the stadium that bears their name, that gives the rivalry its edge.