Valmiera FCValmiera FC are a club that wrote one of the most surprising stories in modern Latvian football in 2022, only to suffer an equally dramatic fall three years later. The current club was founded on 29 February 1996 - a year before the bankruptcy of its predecessor, FK Gauja Valmiera, which had represented the city in the top division from 1978 to 1993 and won the final ever championship of the Latvian SSR in 1990. The new club was founded by Imants Saulītis, who became club president, Jevgenijs Katajevs, the team's first coach, and Guntars Melecis.
After years spent mostly in the second tier, interrupted by a brief spell in the top flight in the early 2000s, Valmiera returned to the Virslīga in 2018 after a fourteen-year absence. The rebuilding process culminated in the 2022 season, when a squad with an average age of just 22.4 - among the youngest ever to win a title anywhere in Europe - put together a run of fifteen consecutive victories that summer, matching the best such streak in the history of Latvia's top division. On 12 November 2022, following a 2-0 away win over FK Liepāja, Valmiera won the Latvian championship for the first time in the club's history, earning a debut appearance in Champions League qualifying.
The success proved short-lived, however. Ahead of the 2025 season, the club was denied a licence to compete in the Virslīga and had to begin competing at a lower level instead. Known as the black-and-greens, and supported by the Valmiera Boyz fan group, the team play their home matches at the Jānis Daliņš Stadium in Valmiera, named after the Latvian Olympic 400-metre champion of 1936.
