Dire Dawa Kenema

The Dire Dawa Stadium holds 18,000 and gives Dire Dawa Kenema a home that has outlasted the club itself once already. The side that plays there today is not, strictly, the one that first took the field: the original club, founded in 1982, folded, and it took until 2003 for a new Dire Dawa Kenema to be built with the specific aim of putting the city back on Ethiopia's football map.

That climb took over a decade. A regional third-tier campaign in 2004–05 led to the second-tier Ethiopian National League a year later, and the club reached the Ethiopian Premier League for the first time in 2007–08. It did not hold on. Ashenafi Girma, one of its better players, left for Meta Abo Beer during the 2010–11 season, and Dire Dawa Kenema went down after 2011–12. The return took three years, arriving after the 2014–15 season, and an 11th-place finish in 2015–16 was as high as the following seasons managed — the club has spent most of its Premier League life fighting to stay there rather than for anything above it.

Girma Ashenafi, no relation to the earlier departure by name confusion alone, gives the club its clearest individual thread: an Ethiopian international with 11 caps, he wore Dire Dawa Kenema's colours from 2008 to 2016, spanning both the relegation and the years either side of it. Off the pitch, the club's run of coaching changes has occasionally turned litigious — Fisseha Teumelisan was sacked in February 2021 and sued for unpaid wages, a dispute that said as much about the club's finances as any league table.

The nicknames, ምስራቃውያን and ቡርትካናማዎቹ in Amharic — the Easterners and the Orange Ones — point to the same thing from two directions: a city in Ethiopia's east, and the orange and yellow the team wears there.