FK Liepāja

Despite being founded only in 2014, FK Liepāja can lay claim to some very significant Latvian football heritage, FK Liepājas Metalurgs ,which existed from 1997 till 2014 and galvanized regional football (and football fans) around itself. In some ways, FK Liepāja is a phoenix club of Liepājas Metalurgs, but whether they are rightful heirs to the rich and important football legacy of Liepāja is, at the moment, up for debate.

FK Liepājas Metalurgs was, in turn, at the apex of local football heritage going back to 1909. In its 17 years of existence, the club became one of the most recognized sides in Latvia and, in 2005, became the first team to interrupt Skonto FC’s 13-year dominance of the domestic championship. In addition to winning the Virslīga twice and the Latvian Cup once, FK Liepājas Metalurgs had an exciting, albeit brief, record of participating in the qualification stages of European competitions and was part of the historic Courland derby, going head to head against FK Ventspils.

FK Liepājas Metalurgs enjoyed popular support in the city, not least because of its intimate connection with the Liepāja metallurgical plant, the Liepājas Metalurgs, which was a major employer in Liepāja until it finally succumbed to the consequences of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis and filed for bankruptcy in 2013, taking the club down with it the following year.

In its early days, FK Liepāja generally picked up where Metalurgs left off, fostering local talent and getting some of the FK Liepājas Metalurgs back together, but times had changed and, despite a strong start, the club’s competitive fortunes continued to decline, especially with the arrival of future Latvian grands Riga FC and FC RFS into the Virslīga. FK Liepāja has won the Latvian league title in 2015 and the Latvian Cup twice, in 2017 and 2020. The club has grown under the leadership of well-known figures like Māris Verpakovskis, a famous Latvian player, and current sporting director Ivan Djurdjević. In 2018, a change in ownership saw Māris Verpakovskis depart for RFS and resulted in a change of strategic direction of the club away from being a club of the city and of the (former) workers and towards global football markets, especially in Africa.

For many years, FK Liepāja was the pinnacle of the local Liepāja municipal football school which is, both historically and contemporaneously, respected and admired in Latvia for consistently producing quality players. However, because the club explicitly re-oriented itself away from the local talent and towards importing foreigners in large batches approximately every 6 months, local football fans gradually turned away from FK Liepāja and towards a smaller team from a nearby town, Grobiņas SC, who built their squad first and foremost around local players from the local football school. When Grobiņas SC/LFS earned promotion to the Virslīga in 2024, a new, highly principled derby of opposing club and player development philosophies was born!

The club is owned by Oļegs Hramovs, a Liepaja-based Lithuanian-russian real estate and shipping magnate. He continues to support the growth of the club through continuous investments, establishing FK Liepāja as one of the ‘traditional Top 5’ clubs in Latvian association football.