Melaka

Hang Jebat Stadium sits in Paya Rumput, with room for 40,000, and it was the ground the state side turned to once its own football history had grown too big for anything smaller. That history goes back to 1921, when Malacca first put out a team in the Malaya Cup, three years before the state association formally registered the club. Green and white have carried the name since, and the nickname Hang Tuah, borrowed from the Malay warrior of legend, tied the club to the state's own folklore rather than to anything it had won.

What it did win came in thin stretches. The Malaysia Super League title in 1983 remains the one season the club stood at the top of the domestic game, a mark it never matched at that level again. Lower down, the club took the second-tier Malaysia Premier League in 2016 and the third-tier FAM League the year before that, climbing back up through the divisions rather than staying there. Runners-up finishes in the old Piala FAM in 1957 and 1958 mark how far back that pattern of near misses runs.

The Naning Derby against Negeri Sembilan FC gave the club its sharpest rivalry, fought under the Melaka United name the club carried after a 2018 rebrand. That name stopped mattering in 2022, when unpaid wages and unmet licensing left the club dissolved outright. Melaka FC picked up the state's colours the following year, but it started again from the bottom tiers, without the right to claim the 1983 title or anything else the old club had earned.