SK BRANN

Sportsklubben Brann is a Norwegian professional football club, founded 26 September 1908, in Bergen. Christen K. Gran and Birger Gjestland together with eight other men, met in a local café in Bergen. Due to dissatisfaction of the current state of the local football clubs in Bergen, they decided to form a new football club. They called it Ski- og Fodboldklubben Brann (Ski and Football Club Brann). This was later changed to Sportsklubben Brann (Sport Club Brann). Brann played their first match against a local Bergen team on New Year's Day 1909, drawing 1–1.

SK (Sports Klubben) Brann had been in the Elitesirien, Norway's Premier Division of Football, since 1987, bar one season spent in the 1st Division, in 2015. They play their home matches at Brann Stadion. where they had a record-breaking 17,310 in average attendance in the 2007. In October 2007, Brann won the Norwegian league title for the first time since 1963.

As the biggest club in Norway's second-largest city Bergen (Pop:285,000), Brann is historically one of the major clubs in Norway in terms of public interest, and hence there are high expectations for the club every season. Brann won their first Norwegian top flight titles in 1961–62 and 1963, but after this Brann was involved in the race for the league title only in seasons 1974–76, 1990 and 2006. In 2007, they reclaimed the league title and thus ended a 44-year-long waiting period.

Despite the limited success, the club has never failed to spark considerable interest from the Norwegian media and keeping an epidemic of football hysteria continuously running in Bergen. Moreover, Brann have regularly been winners and runners-up of the Norwegian Cup. The club reached the quarter-finals of the European Cup Winners' Cup, in the 1996–97 season, won eventually by Barcelona.

The city, sited on Norway's western coast, is an international center for aquaculture, shipping, the offshore petroleum industry and subsea technology, and a national centre for higher education, media, tourism and finance. It hosts the School of Meteorogical and Geo-Physical Institute since 1917. The port, a natural fjord, surrounded by 7 mountains, is Norway's busiest in terms of both freight and passengers, with over 300 cruise ship calls a year bringing nearly a half a million passengers to Bergen, a number that has doubled in 10 years.  

Almost half of the passengers are German or British. Below is the Fjord! drawn in 1580, and trading first known in the 1020s.