When people think of rivalries in Icelandic football, they will likely be imagining KR vs Valur, or possibly something less historic and more to do with recent title contenders – Víkingur, Breiðablik, Valur or some other combination depending on who you root for.
It’s safe to say that the nature of football in the country makes for strange conditions for the fomenting of rivalries. The two biggest teams in the North are both from Akureyri and so you would think are primed for a hatred, and yet in womens competition we see Þór and KA combined as a single squad.
As we head down the tiers of the narrow football pyramid, you come to clubs that to varying extents have become affiliated with larger and more successful ones, some even seen as de facto reserve squads. In those conditions it is also hard to form any meaningful rivalry when the majority of attendees at matches are friends and family of the players. Some competing clubs, including a couple mentioned in this article, are even affiliated with the same larger entity and so are on too pleasant of terms to ever really hate each other.
That being said, rivalries are fun and can add an extra level of interest in a long season. I’ve compiled a list of lesser-thought of rivalries in Iceland, some of which I have completely invented for arguably arbitrary reason. Every tradition has to start somewhere though right?
Elvis’ Game
13 wins
14 wins
5 draws
This is by far the most real and established rivALRY IN THIS LIST, and locally is usually called “Breiðholtsbraut Derby” – for the road sort-of connecting the two home grounds – “Breiðholtsslagurinn” or “Baráttan um Breiðholtið” – both roughly meaning “the battle of/for Breiðholt”. That’s because These are the two biggest clubs from the Breiðholt area of Reykjavík, sometimes referred to as “The Ghetto” due to it’s reputation for being a poorer area than the rest of the city.
Leiknir arguably make the bigger deal of the Elvis connection, playing “In the Ghetto” on the loud speakers before home games. Despite ÍR forming their football club in 1939 and Leiknir theirs in 1973, the two have actually only met in 32 competitive matches, so far as I can tell.
The first was in 1996, where the clubs met in the men’s second tier and ÍR won 3-2 in both games as Leiknir finished the season at the foot of the table. Despite it being an even series since then, they’ve not played in the same division since 2018, while they’ve most recently faced off in this years pre-season Reykjavíkurmót, ÍR on top in that one with a score of 5-3. The drought of league games against each other ends this year too, With ÍR newly promoted to Lengjudeild and Leiknir a playoff team in it last year.
2024 planned meetings*:
18 May at Leiknir
25 July at ÍR
*: all fixture dates in this article are subject to change
Á ársins
(Á of the year)
4 wins
0 wins
0 draws
As i’ve mentioned previously in social media posts, Árborg originally requested to KSÍ to be known as KÁ when they formed, which was rejected due to potential confusion with a similarly named business close by to them in Selfoss. That wasn’t an issue years later in the Ásvellir area of Hafnarfjörður as no such namesake existed locally.
Thus was born a tongue-in-cheek grudge which I intend to recognise as a budding rivalry in the lower tiers.
To help that cause, the contests have been dramatically one-sided so far, and that should make KÁ hungry for revenge. The first meeting was in the League cup where Árborg won 5-1, and the subsequent 4deild match was the only one of the 4 matchups where the winning team has scored fewer than 5 goals. The silver lining for Árborg narrowly missing out on promotion last year is that we can look forward to 2 more league games between the clusb this year, and see who is the better “KÁ”-club in 2024.
2024 planned meetings:
13 June at Árborg
22 August at KÁ
The Boomerang Game
3 wins
0 wins
0 draws
This one is hampered somewhat by the aforementioned way that clubs become tied to larger ones, but this matchup, ripe with Australian cliché, has the makings of a genuine rivalry. Australian? let me explain:
I’ve decided to refer to this one as the Boomerang game due to the fact that in the few early encounters we have seen, the scoreline of 3-2 just keeps coming back, as do the winning side who have been a goal behind 4 times in the 3 games. Only in the most recent, which was in the league cup, did the eventual winner take an initial lead. In that instance Elliði actually managed to level from 2 down, only for Árbær to find a late winner, just as they have in all 3 games (the other 2 were in stoppage time).
Elliði might feel aggrieved to be on the wrong end of these results, but what has really added to the bitter taste between the clubs (and my ability to link to Aussie themes) is that in 2024 Árbær has been unable to hire their previous pitch from Elliði’s parent club Fylkir, forcing them to play home games outside of the area they are named for. So you see, Árbær and Elliði used to be “Neighbours”, but now when Árbær host games they will simultaneously be “Home and Away”.
2024 planned meetings:
2 July “at” Árbær, but actually in Breiðholt
7 September at Elliði
Southern Highlanders
0 wins
0 wins
1 draws
I’ve spoken before on Instagram, and at greater length as a guest on the Forgotten Football Podcast, about how Uppsveitir formed in 2020 as an amalgamation of several clubs in order to be more competitive. One of those clubs was Hrunamenn and one of their rare victories in KSÍ sanctioned matched was on penalties against KFR in the cup (though you’ll notice I haven’t counted that as a win for Uppsveitir).
KFR and the combination club of fellow Highland borderers have only played each other once in the few years that the latter has existed – a 1-1 draw in the 2022 league cup.
New rivalries can be important too, and both clubs have been touted as potential contenders for the sixth division this year following Uppsveitir being relegated after a tough 2023 campaign. This years league cup wasn’t kind to them however, with a -37 goal difference across just 5 games. They’ll be hoping that was just a symptom of pre-season football.
2024 planned meetings:
27 June at KFR
24 August at Uppsveitir
Not Quite Choral
0 wins
0 wins
0 draws
The most complete example of how everything starts from nothing – these clubs have never played against each other because this is the first season of Þorlákur playing in the league, and their first of playing competitive games of 11v11.
The reason I have paired them is obvious though: they both play their home games on the outdoor artificial grass pitches next to HK’s dome-home Kórinn, which translates in English as “The choir”.
Joining each other in the sixth tier, it remains to be seen how these two clubs will match up. Þorlákur didn’t take part in the league cup this pre-season but at the time of writing have just won their opening league game against Léttir, who fared worse in lengjubikarinn (1 point from 5 games, -17 goal difference) than KM (3 points from 4 games, -8 goal difference), albeit in a different group.
2024 planned meetings:
18 June with Þorlákur as supposed home side
21 August with KM as supposed home side
Accessibility Through Engineering
8 wins
0 wins
0 draws
Now I’ll admit that this rivalry is the most tenuous, in part because I decided against including KFS and Tindastóll as rivals based on their locations for puffin-watching tourism. This is also the only rivalry in this post with teams not in the same division in 2024, plus both teams are somewhat affiliated to ÍA.
My reason for pitting these two teams against each other is more about a similarity between the towns they come from, with one key difference.
Kári play in Akranes, a town not far from the ring road and accessed since 1998 from all points south using the Hvalfjörður tunnel, which made a section of the journey that previously took an hour now only take 7 minutes.
Skallagrímur call the town of Borgarnes home. The Borgarfjörður bridge is the second-longest in Iceland and made it possible to reach Borgarnes from the south in 5 minutes rather than the previous half an hour.
That’s it, that’s all there is to it. Both teams are somewhat close together by the standards of outside of the capital region, and they both became more accessible as a result of great feats of engineering. Are you #TeamTunnel or #TeamBridge
2024 planned meetings:
None, unless they’re drawn against each other in fótbolti.net-bikarinn