Crusaders FC Crusaders Football Club is a Northern Irish football club from north Belfast, founded in 1898. For the first decades of its existence, the team competed only at junior and intermediate level, winning nine Irish Intermediate League titles and seven Steel & Sons Cups during that period — a competition whose final is still traditionally held on Christmas Day at the club's Seaview ground.
A turning point in Crusaders' history came in 1949, when, following the withdrawal of the historic Belfast Celtic from competition, the club was elected to Northern Ireland's top flight. Since then, the team, nicknamed The Crues and The Hatchetmen and playing in distinctive red and black, has won a total of 32 major trophies, including seven league titles. The first two of these — in the 1972–73 and 1975–76 seasons — came during the club's golden era in the 1970s, when Crusaders regularly competed for supremacy in the Irish League against sides such as Glentoran and Coleraine.
The 1975–76 championship earned the team a place in the European Cup the following season, 1976–77 — a competition ultimately won by England's Liverpool, claiming their first-ever title in the tournament. It was at the first-round stage that Crusaders faced the eventual champions, losing 0–5 in Belfast. Although the result was a heavy one for the Northern Irish side, the match remains a lasting part of the club's history, linking a small side from Seaview to the story of one of the most famous European campaigns in football history.
Today, Crusaders remain a permanent fixture of the NIFL Premiership, and the 2008–09 season proved especially memorable, when, under manager Stephen Baxter — the club's longest-serving coach — the team won the Irish Cup for the first time since 1968, earning it a place in the UEFA Europa League against North Macedonia's Rabotnički. In 2009, Crusaders became the first club in the Irish League to install a UEFA-approved 4G artificial pitch at Seaview.
