Al Zulfi

Al-Zulfi spend their football in the Saudi First Division League, the second tier, and their season runs alongside a change in who owns them: the club has sat with the General Sports Authority since it was set up, and in 2025 it was placed on the privatisation list drawn up under Vision 2030. Whatever the league table says in May, the ownership question is the one that will outlast it.

The nearest thing to a night out of the ordinary came in the King's Cup, where Al-Zulfi reached the round of 16 and drew Al-Hilal. Cup football has its own rules, and the draw put a First Division side from a town of 3,000-seat crowds in front of the country's most decorated club. There is no King's Cup in the trophy cabinet, and no other major football honour.

What the cabinet does hold comes from 2016, and mostly from other halls. In one year the club took the Bureau Cup in football, in handball and in volleyball, and won the national court tennis championship as well. That is the shape of the place: a town club that fields teams in several sports and counts them all as its own.

Home is the Al-Zulfi Club Stadium, which holds 3,000. The main stand has 48 seats and the secondary one 64, which tells you where most people watch from. Orange and green have been the colours throughout; white joined them in 1988/89.

Al-Zulfi sits in Riyadh Province, roughly 260 km north-west of the capital, and the club grew out of that town rather than out of the capital's football economy. It was founded in 1969 — 1389 in the Hijri calendar — under a different name: Markh.