Slovan Liberec was the first club outside Prague to win the Czech title
For the first nine seasons of the independent Czech league, the champions always came from Prague. In 2002 a club from the northern city of Liberec broke the pattern. Slovan Liberec's title under coach Ladislav Škorpil earned it a Champions League qualifier against AC Milan, who went on to win the whole competition that season.
Football in Liberec has a tangled past. Until 1945 most of the city's residents were German speakers, and German clubs, starting with one founded in 1899, ran their own league. The first Czech club appeared only in 1919, after the First World War. When the Munich Agreement of 1938 handed the border region to Germany, Czech football in the city stopped for seven years.
After liberation in 1945 the city became thoroughly Czech, and the old clubs resumed in the leagues they had occupied before the war. Communist rule from 1948 brought new names, and in 1958 officials decided to merge two local clubs into one team strong enough to reach the top division. Players and fans were furious, but the merger went ahead, and TJ Slovan Liberec was born on 12 July 1958, its name stressing the club's Czech identity.
The climb was slow. In the 1970s the second division included many Slovak teams, so Liberec's players sometimes had to fly to away games in the far east of the country. After weathering a financial crisis that followed the 1989 Velvet Revolution, Slovan was one of six second-tier clubs lifted into the new Czech First League when Czechoslovakia split in 1993, and it has never been relegated since.
Beyond the 2002 breakthrough, Slovan has added two more league titles and a domestic cup, and in 2007 it knocked Serbian champions Red Star Belgrade out of the UEFA Cup. Its sponsor is the glassmaker Preciosa, and its blue and white crest shows the nearby Ještěd mountain with its famous television tower. In 2024 businessman Ondřej Kania bought a controlling stake.
Source: FC Slovan Liberec
