Ballymena United

Six Irish Cups sit in Ballymena United's cabinet, and the first of them was lifted in 1929 by a team that no longer exists. Ballymena F.C., founded in the town in 1928, took the trophy that year and then dissolved at the end of the 1933/34 season. The Irish League met on 20 June 1934 and voted unanimously to admit a successor in its place; the new club took the name Ballymena United and inherited the ground, the city, and eventually the record books.

The cup returned in 1958 under player-manager Alex McCrae, who won it in his first season in charge, and again in 1984 under Jim Platt, a goalkeeper who had left Ballymena for Middlesbrough at eighteen for a then-record £7,000 fee before coming back to manage the club he started at. Alex McKee, who had played through the 1960s and 1970s, took the same route into the dugout in 1987 and his side delivered the sixth Irish Cup in 1989. His reserve team around that time included a young Brendan Rodgers, who moved on to Reading rather than into the first team at the Showgrounds.

The Ballymena Showgrounds has held the club since its founding, with a capacity of 4,100, though the safe limit is set lower, at 3,600; the town council took ownership of the ground from the club during the 1970s. Locally the team is known as the Sky Blues, for the shirt, and as the Braidmen, for the river that runs past the town. Matches against Coleraine carry the name A26 Derby, after the road linking the two towns.

Ballymena United has not dropped out of Northern Ireland's top flight since 1936, a run that survived a public fundraising appeal to clear the club's debts in 1955 and, in 2023, a boardroom reshuffle brought on by the cost of running a part-time squad in an increasingly professional league. The most recent addition to the trophy room is the League Cup, won in 2017; the Irish Cup has stayed out of reach since 1989.