FC Utrecht

FC Utrecht, formally Football Club Utrecht, is a Dutch professional football club based in the city of Utrecht. It competes in the Eredivisie, the top tier of Dutch football, and plays its home matches at the Stadion Galgenwaard. The club was founded on 1 July 1970 through a merger of the professional departments of three local clubs, VV DOS, USV Elinkwijk and Velox, a step the municipality of Utrecht encouraged so that the city would keep top-level professional football. Since then it has won three national cup tournaments, in 1985, 2003 and 2004, and took the Johan Cruyff Shield in 2004 as the first club outside the traditional Dutch Big Three to do so. It is the only club outside the Big Three that has never been relegated from the Eredivisie. Utrecht has played in 15 European campaigns, with its best results in the group stages of the 2004-05 UEFA Cup and the 2010-11 UEFA Europa League. In the early 1980s a tax investigation put the club close to bankruptcy before a petition and local support saved it.