Hamburger SV For over half a century, a giant clock inside the Volksparkstadion counted, to the second, how long Hamburger SV had spent in the Bundesliga without interruption. On 12 May 2018, after 55 years, the clock finally stopped, as HSV became the first club to be relegated from a division it had never left since the league's founding in 1963, a fall that ended one of German football's most singular records.
The club itself traces its roots to 1887, through a predecessor formed that year, though Hamburger SV in its current form emerged from a 1919 merger of three Hamburg clubs. HSV won six German championships in total, in 1923, 1928, 1960, 1979, 1982 and 1983, and remains one of only a handful of clubs to have been crowned champions in both the pre-war German championship and the modern Bundesliga era.
The club's greatest years came under coach Ernst Happel and later with players such as Kevin Keegan and Felix Magath, when HSV won two European trophies within six years. In 1977 the team lifted the Cup Winners' Cup, beating Anderlecht 2-0 in Amsterdam with goals from Georg Volkert and Magath, and in 1983 HSV reached the pinnacle of European club football, defeating Juventus 1-0 in the European Cup final in Athens through a single goal from Magath, still the club's most celebrated result on the continent.
Financial troubles in the following decades gradually eroded HSV's standing, and after 2018 the club spent seven consecutive seasons in the second division, the longest such spell in its history, before finally sealing an immediate promotion back to the top flight in May 2025 with a 6-1 win over Ulm.
Nicknamed Die Rothosen for their red shorts, HSV play their home matches at the Volksparkstadion, on the site the club has called home since the 1950s. Now back among Germany's elite, Hamburg carries into the present a history defined as much by its decades of uninterrupted top-flight football as by the trophies won during its golden years in the late 1970s and early 1980s.