All of our heroes are noted whenever we present our roster ahead of a tournament. Ancient names like Shiribeshi, Asgard, Lelantos, but also their teammates that aren't noted there but deserve to be remembered. Then there are the more recent inclusions like Rilasthaunden, Juliasterinthen, and Enshadilsa: people who's active playing career is long behind them but have left a very direct mark on the current national team. And then there's the entire World Cup 89 squad, included as a whole for finally winning us that trophy.
And that's just football. Gridiron and rugby have their own lists of famous (ex-)players, as do cricket and baseball, though the records there are spottier and depend completely on who compiled the list. Good luck finding all of the Finisterran legends in a baseball Hall of Fame if it's compiled by a Yoshiman. Combining both lists gives you a decent impression, though.
For whatever reason, Ko-oren does't have a single name that pops up in multiple sports. Most sports are regional enough that whoever grew up playing cricket, didn't later switch to cricket or vice versa (though some overlap between rugby league and union has started existing in the last generation or so).
Nearly every small town should have a square or a bus stop named after a local hero, if they made the national team and maybe won a prize there, but that's very, very local. Larger cities often don't deal with the naming of places after people – though the reverse happens quite a bit: people with last names like Amandien (if they're francophone and their ancestors are from the southeast) or Van Meinaard (if they speak Dutch but their ancestors are from Maynard).
(As a sidenote: languages like English, Dutch, French, and Japanese are later arrivals to the Dragonfly archipelago, where people exclusively spoke one of the Gehrennan languages, often a language confusingly called Gehrennan itself. Many places with English/Dutch/French/Japanese names are originally Gehrennan, but are now called something in the new language that sounds vaguely like the word in Gehrennan. Think Seterbohdu turning into Sterrenwolde, or Menamar turning into the previously mentioned Maynard)
A great example of a well respected local hero would be someone like Claudia Macedo – a fantastic goalkeeping career for posh Miradela GD (as opposed to Branvon CD, who are a bit folksy) - who ran for mayor of Santa Teresa and got incredibly close, before going back into a football direction. Fin Fenner is still a household name in the northeast: any time a true playmaker shows up (Janoreirinthen, for instance), everyone living in Straudum and further up will comment "Sure, but it's no Fenner". Fin himself, meanwhile, mostly left the public eye and disappeared to some farmland in rural Sudaefjoll. He's a local hero in many towns (which makes you wonder if that's still considered 'local') but not to his wishes. From the same area, there's Svarlamn Norn, a starter on the defence back when that didn't have 5 players on it yet. He is very much a local hero and he's enjoying every minute of it, signing autographs for whoever wants it, but also buying up businesses and real estate all along the Sudaefjoll coast, and coasting on the good will of him as a player to counterbalance the questionable moves and awful landlording that's going on.
Apparently you can't have a local hero without a downside: we're still looking for the ex-pro player who is willing to let their career be their career and do some 'honest' work, not overplaying their fame but also not entirely loathing it.
