Mamelodi Sundowns FC

Mamelodi Sundowns come into this season on the back of eight consecutive Premier Soccer League titles, a run stretching from 2017/18 to 2024/25. Last season added a second CAF Champions League crown to the one already won in 2016. No club in South Africa has collected more honours.

The yellow, green and blue kit echoes Brazil's national colours, which is where the nickname The Brazilians comes from. Home games are played at the Lucas "Masterpieces" Moripe Stadium in Atteridgeville, Pretoria, holding 28,900; the larger Loftus Versfeld is called on for the biggest occasions, among them Derby Day against Orlando Pirates, the most heated fixture in South African football. Pretoria's own rivalry, the Tshwane derby, is played against SuperSport United.

Pitso Mosimane won eleven trophies as coach, including the 2016 CAF Champions League final, beating Zamalek 3-1. Ted Dumitru had already carried the club through three straight league titles from 1998 to 2000 and into a CAF Champions League final the following year. Daniel Mudau remains the club's record appearance-maker and top scorer, 390 games and 172 goals between 1992 and 2003. Rafael Chukwu played alongside him as strike partner through three of those championships. Mark Anderson, the goalkeeper of the 1980s and 90s, was the first Sundowns player named South African Footballer of the Year, in 1986 - the year Stanley "Screamer" Tshabalala coached the club to its first major cup.

Patrice Motsepa bought into the club in 2003 and took full ownership a year later, by which point it had carried its name for more than three decades. The story starts earlier still, in Marabastad, north-west of Pretoria, where Frank "ABC" Motsepa, Roy Fisher, Ingle Singh and Bernard Hartze formed Marabastad Sundowns in the early 1960s, naming it after an amateur club from the 1940s. Singh sold his share in 1969, and the following year the team moved to the township of Mamelodi and became Mamelodi Sundowns.