Al Wasl SC

Diego Maradona took charge of Al Wasl in 2011, and the appointment did more for the club's name abroad than any of its finished business at home. Zabeel Stadium had never had a manager draw that kind of attention before, and it has not had one since.

Long before that, the person who mattered most to Al Wasl never left. Zuhair Bakheet spent his entire 18-year career at the club, and went to the 1990 World Cup with the UAE while still tied to Zabeel. A club does not often keep a player that long, and Al Wasl built its identity on the fact that it did.

The club started life in 1960 in the Zaabeel district as Al-Zamalek Club, modelled on the Egyptian side of the same name, founded by a group that included Sheikh Ahmed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. It ran out of a rented house before Dubai's ruler built it a proper headquarters in Zaabeel in 1972. A year later it took the name Al-Wasl, one of Dubai's old names, and in 1974 it absorbed two neighbourhood clubs, Al-Shula and Al-Orouba, becoming one of the founding members of the UAE Football League. Zabeel Stadium opened in 1980 and has been home ever since, now listed at 8,439 seats.

Eight league titles trace back to the 1980s and 1990s, with a run to a ninth stretching into 2024, when Al Wasl also lifted the President's Cup. In between sits a single continental prize, the GCC Champions League in 2009, won on away goals against Qatar SC after the tie finished level over two legs. Dubai's other derby is the one against Al-Nasr, known formally as the Bur Dubai derby, still the fixture that decides bragging rights in the city before any of the others do.

What Al Wasl carries from that first rented house in Zaabeel is the sense of having grown up alongside Dubai itself, taking the city's old name as its own.