Kwara United

Dele Aiyenugba spent four seasons in goal for Kwara United, from 2020 to 2024, long enough to see the club through relegation and back before he moved on, and it was under that shot-stopping spine that Kwara United finally settled into the identity Ilorin now recognises. The team traces its current form to 1997, when the Kwara State government bought Exide Sparkers, a club based in Ibadan, and brought it home to replace the debt-ridden Kwara Bombers. The name changed; the promotion followed almost at once, with the Nigeria National Second Division title that same year lifting the side straight into the top flight.

Staying there has never been simple. Kwara United went down in 2008 and again in 2013, climbing back both times, and when relegation struck again in 2019 the club bought its way back into the Nigeria Premier Football League by taking over Delta Force's slot rather than waiting out a season in the lower tier. A National League title in 2017 had already shown the pattern: whatever division they landed in, they rarely stayed long. The nearest they came to continental football was in 2006, when a regular-season championship in the Premier League pushed them into the play-offs and, from third place there, into the CAF Confederation Cup the following year.

None of it produced a major trophy until 2025, when Kwara United beat Abakaliki FC on penalties, 4-3 after a goalless draw, to win the Nigeria Federation Cup. The Afonja Warriors, as they are known after the warrior king of old Ilorin, had waited nearly three decades under that name for a first title, all the while trading blows with ABS FC across the city in a derby that draws its heat from proximity rather than history. It was Exide Sparkers, a club few in Ilorin had heard of before 1997, that made the Federation Cup possible at all.