The rise of Levadiakos

By Stephen Kountourou

The Greek Super League has had a few surprise package clubs in recent years. 

Teams with less pedigree than the giants of the Greek game, who, despite having far more limited resources, can cobble together a strong core of Greek and foreign players and a pragmatic manager with a functional style of play that can put everything together and finish higher up the table than most would expect them to on face value. 

The likes of PAS Giannina, Lamia, Volos and Panserraikos have all caused shock results, played some entertaining and competitive football and not been afraid to take on teams with bigger budgets and better quality players. 

It is a breath of fresh air from a time when it felt like the majority of teams in the Greek topflight, outside of the big four and Aris, would resort to defensive anti-football with ten men behind the ball from kick off to full time.

Currently, the team that optimises this new trend is Levadiakos. Under Nikos Papadopoulos, the Blue-Greens have been transformed from a team that in recent history was seen as more of an afterthought to a side brimming with attacking flair, smart business in the transfer market and the potential to go even further than what they have achieved in the last two seasons. At the time of writing, they sit 4th in the Greek Super League table.

For most of the early 2000s and 2010s, Levadiakos was, to their credit, consistently competing in the Alpha Ethniki and the Super League after their rise from the Delta Ethniki at the turn of the millennium. Between 2005/06 to 2018/19, the club were only relegated twice and even finished 7th as a newly promoted side in 2011/12. 

Aside from that, their reputation among Greek football fans was that of a side battling relegation every season, playing a rather dour style of football, and, for the big boys of Greek football, a seemingly straightforward six points a season.

A third relegation saw APOL fail to win back instant promotion to the top flight, and after narrowly missing for two seasons in a row, it was third time's the charm as they won Super League 2 in 2021/22. An unsurprisingly poor campaign in 2022/23, however, saw them relegated again, but this was where their fortunes started to change.

Under then manager Sokratis Ofrydopoulos, Levadiakos won promotion back to the first division as Super League 2 Northern division champions. Despite a successful campaign, Ofrydopoulos left the club at the end of his contract in the summer of 2024, and he was replaced by Nikos Papadopoulos, who had just come off the back of managing Greece U21 and the senior national team on a brief interim basis.

Many expected Levadiakos to be fighting against relegation at the start of the 2024/25 season, and even one of the clubs that were favourites to go down. How wrong we all were. Although they had a poor first half of the regular season, they managed to cobble enough results together once the relegation playouts came around, including draws with both Olympiakos and Panathinaikos, and their most impressive results of the campaign, a 4-1 victory against Aris at the Levadia Municipal Stadium. 

APOL started to gather momentum, only losing twice in their final ten games to finish top of the playouts table and comfortably avoid relegation. 

They carried on their good form into the new season, with impressive early results including a 4-1 thrashing of PAOK, drawing with Panathinaikos in Leoforos and their biggest scoreline of the season in a 6-0 against Panetolikos. Even in their only two defeats in the league this season, in a 3-2 thriller against Olympiakos in Karaisaki and a narrow 0-1 loss at home to AEK, they still attempted to play without fear and take the game to the bigger sides in Greece.

The big focus for Levadiakos in the transfer market, with their more limited resources, is in three areas. Players with Super League experience, young Greeks/youth players from the big four and lesser-known foreign players who fit the style that Nikos Papadopoulos wants to play. 

Notable success stories in the last two summer windows include Zini from AEK on loan, who ended up being one of the top scorers in the 2024/25 season and was so impressive that he is now part of Enosis’s first team. 

Enis Cokaj, Sebastián Palacios, Yuri Lodygin, Hördur Magnússon and Benjamin Verbic, all former Panathinaikos players, have become first-team mainstays. Even Super League 2 players such as Ioannis Kosti from Olympiakos B and Fabricio Pedrozo from AEL have shown their true quality in the first division. 

Not to mention players from abroad, like Alen Ozbolt and Hisham Layous, who have also contributed since they arrived in 2024 and 2025, respectively. A big factor in the squad that fewer people talk about, however, is also their longer-serving players. 

Centre back Panagiotis Liagas and left back Marios Vichos came through Levadiakos’s academy, graduated at the same time, and, despite both only being aged 25, are two of the club's time appearance makers, with Liagas fourth and Vichos ninth. 

Add in right back Triantafyllos Tsapras, who also graduated from the youth academy a year later and who will make his 125th league appearance for the club against Panserraikos this season, and you have three of the back four who are APOL born and bred, know what it means to play for the club and lead by example. 

Considering their age, performances, and that they are Greek, the big clubs will be circling them come next summer. Put all of these individuals together, and they make the fantastic functioning machine that is Nikos Papadopoulos’s team. 

In what has become the norm under Papadopoulos, the starting XI is deployed in a 4-2-3-1 formation and looks to play possession-oriented, aggressive football while also being tactically disciplined and having a strong work ethic, and this does not change when coming up against teams superior to them on paper. 

This is reflected particularly in their attack with the side from Levadia, currently the highest goal scorers in the league and the third best overall goal difference, almost unheard of from the side that used to be perennial relegation candidates every season. 

As stated before, they also sit 4th in the table at the time of writing. Whether that is sustainable or not, only time will tell in a long season, even for teams that don’t compete in Europe, thanks to the added fixtures in both the Super League and Greek Cup.

It is important to remember that, while Levadiakos have maintained this form, even since the latter stages of last season, we are only a few months into the current campaign and the likelihood is that their form, based upon the law of averages, should level out over time. Especially with the revamped playoff system starting in 2024/25, disputing the big four and finishing in the championship playoffs at the end of the regular season will be incredibly difficult. 

Panathiniakos, despite a tough start to the season, is still expected to take 4th place after the first 26 matches. But Levadiakos fans can at the very least expect their team to finish in the Europe playoffs, where they will inevitably compete with perennial 5th-place side Aris for a place in the UEFA Conference League qualifiers, and they should fancy themselves to push to make their European debut. 

Beyond this season, it is harder to say. With impressive campaigns come the vultures that are the big four Greek clubs or even other clubs from abroad, who will attempt to poach APOL’s most prized players from them to bolster their own squads. 

It only takes so many squad rebuilds before a team's luck finally runs out. But for now, Levadiakos should continue doing what works for them, on the pitch, in the transfer market, and if they can maintain that, they could definitely cement themselves as Super League regulars once again. 

But this time, as one of the toughest teams to beat outside of the big five, rather than a straightforward three points for their opponents.

@SteveKountourou

Hellas Football