Stade Gabesien

Gabès sits on Tunisia's south-eastern coast, an oasis town built around date palms and a phosphate industry, and for much of the last century its football club has carried the place's name into the country's second tier and back out of it. Stade Gabèsien, known locally as Stayda, grew out of that town's need for a team of its own well before the modern league took its current shape, and the club has spent most of its existence chasing a return to the top flight rather than settling into it.

The record often gets inflated in the telling. Regional South Group titles from the early days of the second division get remembered as championships, when they were really just one half of a promotion route that ran through a separate North Group. The cleaner claim is 2007, when Stade Gabèsien won Ligue 2 outright and went up as champions rather than as the team that finished behind someone else, which is what happened again in 2012 when Olympique du Kef took the title and Gabès settled for second. The closest the club has come to a major trophy was the 2015 Tunisian Cup final, lost to Étoile du Sahel — a defeat, but still the deepest run of the club's history.

The name that travels furthest from Gabès belongs to Radhi Jaïdi, who came through as a boy there before he went on to earn over a hundred caps for Tunisia, win the 2004 Africa Cup of Nations and play in England for Bolton Wanderers. José Clayton, a Brazilian-born defender who took Tunisian nationality, won that same 2004 title after his own spell at the club.

Locally, none of that matters as much as the derby with Avenir sportif de Gabès, the other side from the same town, which draws the kind of crowd at the Stade Municipal de Gabès that league fixtures elsewhere in the south rarely see.

What Stade Gabèsien has never done, across all of it, is win a national championship or lift the Tunisian Cup itself.