Sreenidi Deccan

Nothing tests Sreenidi Deccan quite like the January afternoon when Hyderabad FC finally lined up across from them in the Kalinga Super Cup. Two clubs sharing a city and a postcode had waited until January 19, 2024, for their first competitive meeting, and the derby has carried the weight of that late start ever since.

The senior side itself only reached that stage in 2021, launched in Visakhapatnam on July 7 to take the I-League place its academy had been building toward for years. What it built on was already there: a Hyderabad football academy running age groups from under-13 up, accredited by the All India Football Federation in 2019, long before anyone outside Telangana had reason to know the name. The Deccan Warriors, as the club calls itself, reached the I-League final twice without winning it, finishing runners-up in 2022–23 and again in 2023–24.

Colombian striker David Castañeda did most of the scoring behind those finishes, ten goals in his first season and seventeen in his second, numbers that made him the obvious name attached to the club's early I-League years. Off the pitch, a partnership struck with Benfica in October 2023 pointed toward conditioning and youth coaching rather than transfers.

That academy has kept feeding the sides above it — Levis Zangminlun and Aiborlang Khartangmaw among the under-16 squad that won the SAFF Championship in 2023.