Al Taliya SC

Adnan Al-Hafez stood in goal for Al Taliya during the run that still defines the club: a Syrian Cup final in 2006–07, followed that same season by third place in the Syrian Premier League, the best league finish the club has managed. The final was lost, as the next one would be too, twelve years later in 2018–19, but reaching it twice against clubs with fuller trophy cabinets is the currency Al Taliya trades in.

The team plays under the name given to it in 1971, when Al-Waqqa Club merged with Al-Ahly Club Hama and Umayya Club into a single side for the city. Al-Waqqa itself had been playing since 1941, so the merger did not begin the story, it consolidated it. Taliya, "the vanguard," inherited the red and white of the old clubs and, with them, the nickname Hama Hurricane.

Hama's other big club, Al-Nawair, sits across the same fixture list, and the meetings between the two are called Derby Hama or the Hama Classic, matches where local pride outweighs whatever the league table says that week. Al Baladi Stadium, holding 22,000, is where that rivalry plays out.

Beyond the 2007 cup run, the club pushed into continental competition, reaching the quarter-finals of the Arab Champions Cup in 2007–08 and the round of 32 the following season. Midfielder Khaled Al Saleh and forward Marwan Sayedeh, both capped by Syria, came through those years wearing the shirt, part of a squad that carried a football section inside a much larger club, one that also fields basketball, handball and half a dozen other sports under the same red-eagle badge, all of it running back to that first team put together in Hama in 1941.