Linfield Football Club is a professional football club based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which plays in the NIFL Premiership – the highest level of the Northern Ireland Football League. The club was founded in 1886 as Linfield Athletic Club and in 1905 moved into their current home of Windsor Park, which is also the home of the Northern Ireland national team. The club's badge displays Windsor Castle, in reference to the ground's namesake.
Historically, Linfield's main rival has been Glentoran, with the duo known as the Big Two. This rivalry traditionally includes a league derby played on Boxing Day each year, which usually attracts the largest league attendance of the season. Linfield's average league home attendance is approximately 2,500, the highest in the division and more than double the league's overall average of about 1,000. The club, nicknamed the Blues, are managed by former Northern Ireland international and current all-time NI record goalscorer, David Healy. Healy was appointed on 14 October 2015 to succeed Warren Feeney, who had resigned in order to become assistant manager of Newport County.
Linfield holds several domestic and world records. The club was inaugural winners and one of the eight founding members of the Irish League in 1890, and is one of only three clubs (along with Glentoran and Cliftonville) to have remained in the top division continuously since the league's formation; a joint world record (shared with Scottish club Celtic) for the longest unbroken spell as a member of a national league's top division. Linfield has won 55 league championships to date – more than twice as many titles as any other Northern Irish club, and a joint world record for the most top division league titles won by any club; a record shared with Rangers, who have won 55 Scottish titles. In the 1921–22 season, Linfield completed an unprecedented clean sweep of all seven available trophies – to date, this is the only recorded instance of a seven-trophy season being achieved in world football. In 2006, the club won all four available domestic trophies, to achieve a domestic quadruple. They have also won three domestic trebles along with a world record 25 domestic doubles. The club has lifted the Irish Cup 44 times, the second-highest number of national cup wins by any club in the world, behind only the 47 Liechtenstein Cup wins by Vaduz. Linfield has also won the League Cup a record ten times, and has won 4 all-Ireland cup competitions – the 1960–61 North-South Cup, 1970–71 Blaxnit Cup, 1980–81 Tyler Cup and the 2005 Setanta Cup. The club has never won a European trophy, but did reach the quarter-finals of the 1966–67 European Cup.
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