NK Maribor NK Maribor is a Slovenian football club founded on 12 December 1960 by officials and players of NK Branik Maribor. Nicknamed Vijoličasti (The Purples) or Štajerski ponos (The Pride of Styria), the club remains the most successful team in the history of Slovenian football, holding a record 16 national championships and 9 Slovenian Cups.
Before Slovenia gained independence, Maribor competed in the Yugoslav league system, being promoted to the Yugoslav First League in 1967 and remaining there for five seasons, after which it never returned to the Yugoslav top flight. In the early 1980s, the club was even relegated to the third tier following a bribery scandal. After Slovenia achieved independence in 1991, Maribor became one of the founding members of the new national league, and won the inaugural Slovenian Cup the very next year.
The club's first golden era came between 1997 and 2003, when the team won seven consecutive league titles, and in the 1999–2000 season made its debut in the group stage of the UEFA Champions League — the first time a Slovenian club had reached that far in European competition. Following years of financial crisis, the club experienced a second golden decade, beginning in 2007 with the appointment of former national team player Zlatko Zahovič as sporting director, which brought five consecutive league titles between 2011 and 2015.
One particularly memorable moment came in the 2014–15 season, when Maribor reached the Champions League group stage for the second time in its history, hosting Chelsea at the Ljudski vrt stadium in front of a record crowd of 12,646 spectators. Maribor remains the only Slovenian club to have reached the group stage of both the Champions League and the Europa League, and it has never been relegated from the top flight since the league's inaugural 1991–92 season. The club's home has remained the Ljudski vrt stadium since its founding, and its fiercest rival is Olimpija from the capital Ljubljana, with whom Maribor contests the so-called Eternal Derby.
