Cumbayá

Promotion arrived in 2021, when Cumbayá finished top of Serie B and, for the first time in its history, earned a place in Ecuadorian football's top flight. The manager who took them up, the Paraguayan Raúl Duarte, resigned as soon as the job was done. A year earlier the club had actually lost the play-off final to Guayaquil Sport, and only went up anyway once the league changed its promotion rules.

The club started out in 1970 as Club Deportivo Los Loros, and a move to the Cumbayá district of Quito in 2017 gave it its current identity.

Serie A did not go well. Cumbayá stayed up for three seasons, 2022 to 2024, finishing no higher than 14th of 16 in 2023 before going down again in 2024 as bottom club. Off the pitch the story was messier than the results. Forward Luis Miguel Escalada spoke publicly about salaries left unpaid for four months in 2021. The Argentine pair Cristian Cepeda and Joaquín Pucheta took the club to court over unpaid wages and attempts to remove them from housing the club had provided. Rommel Tapia, son of general manager Coronel Tapia, wore the number 10 shirt through the worst of it, a detail that stuck with people who followed the crisis. Manager Luis Espinel lasted only into 2022 before financial disputes cost him the job too.

Cumbayá has no fixed rival, nothing like the history that binds El Nacional, LDU Quito or Barcelona SC. Home matches are played at the Estadio Olímpico Atahualpa in Quito, known locally as El Coloso del Batán, though the 2025 season found the club playing its home fixtures further out, in Cayambe, at the Guillermo Albornoz ground.