Welayta Dicha SC

Zamalek SC came to Sodo with a continental pedigree and left on penalties, 4-3, after a 2-2 draw on aggregate had settled nothing. That upset, in the 2018 CAF Confederation Cup, followed on directly from what Welayta Dicha had done a year earlier: in 2017, a result that carried the club into continental football and put it in front of an opponent far above its usual level.

The club had not existed long before that. It was founded in 2009 by the Welayta Development Association, built around the identity of the Welayta people rather than growing out of an older institution, and it has carried that name into the Ethiopian Premier League without adding a league title to its record. The Ethiopian Cup has stayed its currency instead — a second one followed in 2025, eight years after the first, giving the club two Cup wins and one CAF campaign to point to.

Locally the players are known as the Bees of Tona, a nickname that has stuck harder than any single result. Home matches are played in Sodo, in the south of the country, at a stadium built to hold 30,000 people — a capacity that dwarfs the town around it and marks out football as the thing Sodo is known for beyond its own region.