ŽNK Ljubljana: The Slovenian cup winners fighting for stability | OneFootball

Some clubs are founded on refusal. ŽNK Ljubljana began when four players decided the conditions they had been given were no longer good enough, and that the only way to change them was to start again.

Four years later, their club defeated Slovenia’s dominant team at the national stadium to win its first major trophy.

After a training session at another club, the four players agreed that the management, conditions and relationships around the team had broken down.

They presented the idea to the rest of the squad. The players followed them. Four years later, in front of 700 people at Stadion Stožice, ŽNK Ljubljana beat ŽNK Mura Nona 1-0 to win the Pokal Pivovarna Union for the first time.

Katja Turk’s 85th-minute goal makes history

The final of the Pokal Pivovarna Union — Slovenia’s women’s cup — remained goalless until the 85th minute. Captain Katja Turk ran onto a long ball, rounded Mura Nona goalkeeper Emillie Tess Gavillet, and finished. VAR checked the goal. It stood.

At the other end, Grad — one of the four players who founded Ljubljana in 2021 — played the full match in goal. The match report from the NZS, Slovenia’s football federation, credited her with three significant saves.

The result becomes even more remarkable in context. Mura Nona are the most decorated team in the competition’s history, with 11 cup titles, and had won the trophy in each of the previous two seasons. According to the NZS, they entered the final unbeaten and had not dropped a point in 23 league matches.

Ljubljana had lost every previous meeting between the teams that season, including a 5-1 defeat. This was not the final stage of a steadily closing gap. It was a club founded four years earlier holding out for 85 minutes against a team that had not dropped a league point all season, and taking its decisive chance.

What the Cup did not buy

The victory proved Ljubljana could compete but it did not solve the club’s harder problems. No general sponsor, no permanent home ground, volunteer-run operations, and no place in European competition.

Slovenia’s place in the UEFA Women’s Champions League is awarded through the league rather than the Cup. Ljubljana did not win the league, so their first national trophy did not bring a European fixture that could be presented to potential sponsors.

As league champions, Mura Nona represented Slovenia in the 2025/26 and 2026/27 UEFA Women’s Champions League qualifying stages. Meanwhile, Ljubljana’s funding problem remained unresolved. Much of the club’s support still came through personal networks, including friends, families and family-owned businesses. It had no general sponsor.

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Grad believes the difficulty begins with visibility.

That limited visibility makes the search for a first major backer harder than the club’s results alone would suggest.

What financial stability would buy is significant because player salaries are not the immediate priority. Grad says greater security would provide better conditions, increased investment in the youth academy and the professionalisation of work currently sustained by volunteers.

The team can compete. Competing costs its founders their evenings.

What followed the Cup win

The 2025/26 season underlined both Ljubljana’s progress and the distance still to travel. In the Ženska nogometna liga Triglav, Slovenia’s women’s top division, Ljubljana played 26 matches, won 19, drew one and lost six. The team scored 148 goals and conceded 23.

Ljubljana finished third with 58 points, one place lower than in the season in which it won the cup. Scoring 148 goals was not enough to reach the top two. The six defeats ultimately carried more weight than the team’s aggregate dominance elsewhere.

The club’s cup defence ended against Mura Nona in the semi-finals. After a goalless match on the artificial pitch at Štadion Ilirija, Ljubljana lost the penalty shootout 4-2. Mura Nona went on to defeat ŽNK Radomlje Medex 2-0 in the final and reclaim the trophy.

A club without a home ground

ŽNK Ljubljana still does not have a permanent ground. It depends on other clubs and municipal facilities for training slots, and Grad is direct about how those slots are allocated.

Registrations, administration, scheduling, social media, travel and communication with parents are almost entirely handled by volunteers with jobs, studies and families of their own.

Slovenia is not a frontier for the women’s game. The Triglav league dates to 1992, and the national structure has existed for more than three decades. That is precisely why Ljubljana’s founding story matters.

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Grad had spent years observing how the NZS worked, how clubs operated and how some disappeared while others were created. ŽNK Ljubljana was built by people who understood the system well enough to know what they did not want to repeat.

The club’s ambitions for the next three years are deliberately straightforward: maintain a stable and competitive senior team, bring more girls into the youth programme, provide a positive environment and secure a general sponsor. Only of those four ambitions depends primarily on results.

What the trophy settled, and what it did not

A cup victory answers a question about a team. The question about whether a club can become sustainable takes longer to resolve.

18 months after the final, Ljubljana had a trophy in the cabinet, a third-place league finish, a semi-final defeat to the same opponent and no European football. The club controlled its values, environment and coaching. It still did not control its pitch or funding.

Whether the conditions change will be decided somewhere other than a cup final.

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