Arda Kardzhali

The men who run Bulgaria's roads bought a third-division club in June 2017, and within three years Arda were playing top-flight football for the first time since the side was founded. PSI Group, a road-building company, took over a team that had been dissolved four years earlier when the money ran out, and rebuilt in 2015 from nothing more than a name and a town.

That name comes from the river. The club spent 1924 as Rodopski Sokol, then twelve post-war years as Minyor, before settling on Arda — the river that runs through Kardzhali and out towards the Aegean.

The climb was quick once it started. A regional title in 2016, the third tier and the amateur league cup both won in 2018, and promotion to the First League at the end of the 2019–20 season. The following campaign brought fourth place, a first European tie in the UEFA Conference League, and a Bulgarian Cup final against CSKA Sofia. Arda lost it 0:1. They matched that fourth-place finish again in 2024–25.

Home is the Arena Arda, which holds 11,114 under its safety certificate — a figure some sources put considerably higher, though the certificate is what counts on a matchday. The Blues from Kardzhali play in light blue at home, black shirts and dark navy shorts away.

Kardzhali is not a football town in the way Sofia or Plovdiv are, and the club's history had been provincial and interrupted for most of a century before the current run. What separates the past decade from everything before it is that someone with money decided the town should have a team in the First League, and then kept paying for it.