Aris

Aleksandr Kokorin arrived in Limassol in 2022 as a forward whose reputation preceded him, and by the end of the season he had been voted the best player in the Cypriot championship. The club he joined had never been champions of Cyprus. In May 2023 it was.

That title came under the ownership of Vladimir Fyodorov, who took over in 2021 and set about buying experience rather than growing it. Viktor Kovalenko came from Italian football, Grigoris Kastanos from the Cypriot national side, and the goalkeeping was handed to imports. The academy has produced no international name anyone outside Limassol would recognise, and the club has never pretended otherwise.

Before all that, the honours board held five Second Division titles, spread across seventy years — 1954, 1956, 1994, 2011 and 2013. That spacing tells its own story: promotion, relegation, promotion again. The nearest the club came to a major trophy in the twentieth century was the Cypriot Cup final of 1989, which it lost. There is a curiosity in the older records, too: Oleh Blokhin, the 1975 Ballon d'Or winner, spent 1990 here.

Home is the Alphamega Stadium. The supporters call themselves the Green Family, after the shirt.

The name comes from Ares, the Greek god of war, and it was chosen on 3 October 1930. Then the money ran out: in 1939 Aris ceased to exist altogether, and stayed gone for thirteen years. It came back in 1952 in the Second Division, which is where the first two of those five titles were won.