Al-Arabi SC

Gabriel Batistuta arrived in Doha in 2003 and still finished the season as the league's leading scorer, with 25 goals. Stefan Effenberg played alongside him.

Those years ran through the 1990s. Between 1990 and 1997 the club took five of its seven Qatar Stars League titles, and in 1995 reached the final of the Asian Club Championship. Adel Al-Mulla, a midfielder who stayed from 1992 to 2005, collected five championships and three Emir Cups in that stretch — a career that maps almost exactly onto the period the club is remembered for.

What came before was a series of name changes. The club began on 1 April 1952 as Shabab Al-Sharq, became Al-Tahrir in 1956, then merged with Al-Wehda in 1957 and carried that name for fifteen years. Al-Arabi SC dates only from the 1972 rebrand — twenty years after the founding date the club counts from.

The Emir of Qatar Cup is the trophy the club has held longest and most often: nine wins, the first three coming in consecutive seasons from 1977-78, the most recent in 2022-23. That last one broke a gap of thirty years.

Since 2023 the home ground has been Al Thumama Stadium, which seats 44,400. The move came from Grand Hamad Stadium, where the capacity was 13,000.