Sheffield has two things that no other city in England can claim simultaneously: Sheffield FC, the world’s oldest football club (1857), and two separate top-flight football clubs whose grounds sit on opposite sides of the city. Sheffield Wednesday at Hillsborough in the north-west. Sheffield United at Bramall Lane in the south-east. The Steel City Derby between them is one of English football’s oldest and most intensely local rivalries – the kind where the result is felt at work on Monday in ways that the neutral observer finds slightly alarming.

Hillsborough has been the Wednesday home since 1899. The stadium sits in a residential part of north Sheffield, surrounded by Wednesday pubs and Wednesday streets, and generates a matchday geography that reorganises the neighbourhood around it. The Wednesday fan identity has historically been the larger-city identity – Wednesday were England’s dominant team in the Victorian era, won four league titles, and for much of Sheffield’s football history were the senior club. The cup finals, the European campaigns, the Don Revie-era near-misses – Wednesday carry a nostalgia for a greatness that’s been absent for longer than most of their current supporters have been alive.

Bramall Lane is the oldest major sports venue in the world – it hosted Test cricket before it became a football stadium, and the cricket ground is still there adjacent to the football pitch. United’s identity is different from Wednesday’s: harder-edged, more working-class in self-image, connected to the south and east of Sheffield rather than the north. The United supporter culture is less romantic about the club’s history because the history is shorter in terms of genuine success, but the relationship with the club is no less intense for that.

The recent history of the derby has been shaped by the clubs spending significant periods in different divisions, which means the fixtures haven’t always happened. When they do happen, the city divides along lines that have been drawn since childhood. Families split by allegiance, workplaces conducting their own silent derby weeks before the game, the result capable of distorting social dynamics for days afterward.

The rivalry is genuinely felt rather than performed. Sheffield has no other sport that commands the same loyalty. The Tigers, the Eagles, the Sharks, the Steelers – rugby, basketball, ice hockey all have their followings – but football, and specifically the derby, is the primary emotional register of Sheffield civic identity for a substantial proportion of the population.

What makes the Steel City Derby particularly Sheffield is the lack of glamour around it. There is no global attention, no international television audience constructing narratives about the clubs. It is two Sheffield teams playing in Sheffield for Sheffield people, which is the correct amount of scale for what it is.