Union Douala

New Bell, one of Douala's poorer quarters, produced the club before it had a settled name: in 1955 a merger of local sides, Jeunesse Bamiléké, Vent du Nord and Sawaba, brought together men who had arrived in the city from elsewhere. The motto they kept, "Gamakai-Nassara", is Hausa for "Forward, foreigners", and it said plainly who the club was for. Two years later it became Union Sportive de Douala.

Its best football came early. Union Douala had already taken the Cameroon Cup as Jeunesse Bamiléké in 1954, and by 1979 it had gone further than any Cameroonian club before it, beating Ghana's Hearts of Oak on penalties after the two legs finished level to win the African Cup of Champions Clubs. Bell scored the only goal of the tie, a penalty in the last minute of the first leg in Yaoundé. Two years later the club added the Cup Winners' Cup against Nigeria's Stationery Stores. Five league titles followed across four decades, the last of them in 2012.

None of that carried through to 2025. Nineteen points and bottom place in Elite One sent Union Douala down in June, ending 67 straight seasons among Cameroon's top clubs.

The goalkeeper Joseph-Antoine Bell is the name still attached to the club's peak years. He kept goal through the 1976 and 1978 championships and the continental run of 1979, before a career that took him on to the Cameroon national side and to football in France.