Olympiacos FC
Also written as Olympiacos Piraeus.
The club
Olympiacos Football Club were founded in Piraeus on 16 May 1924, with official recognition following on 10 March 1925, formed from a merger of local clubs and named for the ideals of the ancient Olympics. This is Olympiacos Piraeus, the major Greek club and record champions; it is not Olympiacos Nicosia, the unrelated Cypriot club of the same name, and it is not PAOK of Thessaloniki or Panathinaikos of Athens, the other major Greek clubs covered elsewhere in this corpus. Panathinaikos, in fact, are Olympiacos's fiercest rival, so the two must never be confused with one another.
The club plays at the Georgios Karaiskakis Stadium in Piraeus, capacity 33,334. The site began as the Neo Phaliron Velodrome in 1895/96, hosting track cycling at the 1896 Athens Olympics, and the original football ground there held around 35,000, with a record attendance of 45,445 set for a match against AEK Athens on 7 April 1965. The stadium was completely demolished and rebuilt ahead of the 2004 Athens Olympics, reopening as a 32,115-seat all-seater ground built in around 14 months at a reported cost of some 60 million euros, and now faces a different direction to the original. It has hosted the 1971 European Cup Winners' Cup final between Chelsea and Real Madrid and the 2023 UEFA Super Cup between Manchester City and Sevilla, relocated there from Kazan after Russia's UEFA suspension. Renovation plans announced in 2026 target an expansion beyond 50,000 seats.
The club's colours are red and white; Olympiacos are nicknamed Erythrolefkoi, "the red-whites", and Thrylos, "the Legend", and their emblem is a laurel-crowned Olympic athlete. Evangelos Marinakis, the Greek shipping magnate who founded Capital Maritime & Trading Corp in 2005, acquired majority control and the presidency in 2010; under his ownership the club won seven consecutive league titles from 2010/11 to 2016/17, further titles either side of 2020, and the 2024 Conference League. Marinakis also owns Nottingham Forest, bought in 2017 and promoted to the Premier League in 2022, and Rio Ave of Portugal, bought in 2023. He was investigated in the "Koriopolis" match-fixing probe opened in 2015 over irregular betting patterns in Greek football, and was acquitted by Greece's Three-Member Criminal Court of Appeal in January 2021. Before Marinakis, George Koskotas controlled the club in the mid-1980s before being convicted of embezzlement, and Sokratis Kokkalis became majority shareholder and president in 1993, running the club until the 2010 takeover.
The head coach is the Spaniard José Luis Mendilibar, in charge since leading the club to the 2023/24 Conference League title.
Recent seasons
Olympiacos won the Greek Super League in 2019/20 with 91 points and 2020/21 with 90, and again in 2021/22 with 83, also winning the Greek Cup in 2019/20. They dropped to third in 2022/23 with 73 points and third again in 2023/24 with 74, the season of their Conference League triumph. They were champions again in 2024/25 with 75 points, also winning the Greek Cup, and finished second in 2025/26 with 58 points from 26 matches, 17 wins, 7 draws and 2 defeats, 45 goals scored and only 11 conceded domestically, while reaching the Champions League knockout-phase play-offs in Europe. Olympiacos also won the 2025 Greek Super Cup.
Honours and landmarks
Olympiacos have won the Greek Super League 48 times, the record number of championships in Greek football, and the Greek Cup 29 times, including 19 League and Cup doubles, plus five Greek Super Cups before the 2025 edition. Their major landmark is continental rather than domestic: the 2023/24 UEFA Europa Conference League, won by beating Fiorentina, which made Olympiacos the first Greek club in history to win a major European trophy. In the same season the club also won the UEFA Youth League, making Olympiacos the first club to win two UEFA trophies in one campaign. Their only other international honour is the 1963 Balkans Cup, won by beating Levski Sofia, the club's first ever international trophy.
Notable scorelines
Olympiacos made their first European Cup appearance on 13 September 1959 against AC Milan in the preliminary round, drawing 2-2 at home and losing 1-3 away. In the 1974/75 European Cup first round they drew 1-1 away to Celtic before beating them 2-0 at home, eliminating the Scottish club and ending a 36-match unbeaten European home run for Celtic, before losing to Anderlecht in the quarter-finals. In the 1998/99 Champions League they reached the quarter-finals, losing 2-1 away to Juventus and then 1-1 at home. In the Derby of the Eternal Enemies against Panathinaikos, the biggest win on record either way is Panathinaikos's 8-2 victory in the Panhellenic Championship on 1 June 1930; a separately sourced claim describes a 6-1 Olympiacos away win at Panathinaikos's old Leoforos Alexandras ground in 1932 as the biggest away win in derby history. The largest Alpha Ethniki-era wins in the fixture are Olympiacos 4-0 at home on 26 February 1967 and Panathinaikos 3-0 away on 2 March 2014, and the largest Greek Cup wins are Olympiacos 4-0 on 16 January 2008 and Panathinaikos 4-0 in the 1986 Cup final. Several derby fixtures have been abandoned for crowd trouble, with three Super League matches, in 1973, 2012 and 2023, awarded as 3-0 wins to Olympiacos as a result.
European record
Olympiacos have competed in Europe since 1959 and have played 378 UEFA competition matches in total, winning 148, drawing 73 and losing 157, scoring 492 goals and conceding 538. They were regulars in the Champions League group stage either side of 2020, reached the last 16 in 2007/08, 2009/10 and 2013/14, and their best run before 2024 was the 1998/99 Champions League quarter-final. Ayoub El Kaabi is the club's all-time leading European scorer with 26 goals in 39 appearances, ahead of Youssef El-Arabi with 20 in 58 and Kostas Mitroglou with 15 in 44.
The 2023/24 Conference League campaign began after Olympiacos dropped out of the Europa League group stage, finishing third in their group with seven points. In the knockout round play-offs they beat Ferencváros, El Kaabi scoring twice across the tie. In the round of 16 against Maccabi Tel Aviv they lost the home leg 1-4 before winning away 6-1 after extra time, completing a 7-5 aggregate win described as one of the great comebacks in European football. In the quarter-finals against Fenerbahçe they won 3-2 at home, lost 1-0 away, and won the resulting penalty shootout 3-2, the goalkeeper Konstantinos Tzolakis saving three spot-kicks. In the semi-finals they beat Aston Villa 6-2 on aggregate, El Kaabi scoring five goals across the two legs, matching a record for a two-legged European tie also held by Cristiano Ronaldo and Radamel Falcao. The final, on 29 May 2024 at the Agia Sophia Stadium in Athens, was won 1-0 after extra time against Fiorentina, El Kaabi heading in a Santiago Hezze cross in the 116th minute in front of 26,842, with Artur Soares Dias of Portugal refereeing and El Kaabi named man of the match. Fiorentina became the first side since Benfica in 2013/14 to lose consecutive European finals, and Mendilibar became the first manager since Rafael Benítez to win two different major European trophies in consecutive seasons, having won the 2022/23 Europa League with Sevilla. Exact leg-by-leg dates for the play-off round through the semi-final were not established from the sources read here.
Head-to-head notes
The all-time record against Panathinaikos across 231 official matches is 92 wins for Olympiacos, 81 draws and 58 wins for Panathinaikos; in the Super League Greece era specifically, from 1959, it is 55 wins for Olympiacos, 56 draws and 38 for Panathinaikos. A head-to-head record against AEK Athens was not established from the sources read here, beyond the fact that the 1965 record Karaiskakis attendance of 45,445 was set for a match between the two clubs.
Right now (2026/27)
José Luis Mendilibar remains head coach. Olympiacos are sixth in the Super League Greece after one match, a 1-0 home win over Atromitos on 22 August 2026 at the Karaiskakis Stadium, David Carmo scoring in front of 26,614.
In Europe, Olympiacos entered UEFA Champions League qualifying at the third qualifying round; after two matches their record was one draw and one loss, one goal scored and two conceded, and a route into the Europa League league phase was also secured, though the exact mechanism was not established with confidence from the sources read here. This summer's transfer business has brought in the defender David Carmo from Nottingham Forest for around 9 million euros, the forward Armando González from Guadalajara for around 8.6 million, the defender Nair Tiknizyan from Red Star Belgrade for around 6 million and the midfielder Joel Roca from Girona for around 5 million, while the goalkeeper Konstantinos Tzolakis, hero of the 2024 Conference League quarter-final shootout, has left for Hull City for a reported 23.3 million euros, along with the midfielder André Luiz to Sporting Kansas City and the defender Costinha to Brighton, for a summer net profit of around 24.65 million euros.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympiacos_F.C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgios_Karaiskakis_Stadium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelos_Marinakis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympiacos_F.C._seasons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%9326_Olympiacos_F.C._season https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026%E2%80%9327_Olympiacos_F.C._season https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_UEFA_Europa_Conference_League_final https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derby_of_the_Eternal_Enemies
Researched and written for not4quarters. Where a fact could not be established from the sources read, this page says so rather than guessing.