It must be tiring to be the third wheel as consistently as Viktoria Plzeň has been for its Prague rivals. Ever since stunning Czech football by snatching the title in 2022, they have finished 17, 17, 16 and again 17 points behind the eventual champions. Never dropping out of the Top 3 is nice (Sparta cannot say that in the same period, after all), but a club entering its first full campaign while backed by the richest Czech can’t possibly be satisfied with that. And so here we are: both the under-pressure coach Martin Hyský and the powerful show-runner Adolf Šádek openly declaring a title bid, perfectly echoing the name of this wonderful podcast: S klackem proti tankům (“bringing a stick to a tank fight”).

Whenever Viktoria Plzeň have climbed the table in recent past, it meant one thing and one thing only: a title. In 2011, they went from 5th straight to 1st — just like three years ago. In between, they had turned three more podium finishes (2012–13, 2014–15, 2017–18) into the ultimate glory. Now, for a change, we are talking incremental progress — from 3rd to 2nd, from 70 points to 74, from a UEFA Conference League quarter-final to a UEFA Europa League Round of 16 — but meaningful progress nonetheless, not least because of Koubek’s Sophomore Year Curse ©. And if Plzeň navigate three tricky UCL play-off rounds (a tall task), or manage to hold off Priske’s Sparta and close the gap on Slavia at least a little bit (potentially an even taller one), the oldest coach in the league will have done it again.