Bangladesh Police

Kabir Ahmed had already served as vice-captain of Pakistan's team at the 1958 Asian Games when he pulled on the blue and white of Police AC in Dhaka a year later. Nabi Chowdhury and Zahirul Haque, both capped by Pakistan, joined the same year, and Police AC answered by taking the Zakir Hussain Shield 7 years running, from 1959 to 1967.

Six decades on, Amirul Islam spent 15 years in the shirt, and his 17 goals in the 2018–19 Championship League sent Bangladesh Police up into the Premier League. Cioabă left in May 2024; before him, Nicolas Vitorović had already become the club's first foreign coach of the professional era in 2019. A Puerto Rican forward, Sidney Rivera, scored Bangladesh Police's first goal in the Bangladesh Football League. The closest the club had come to a major final before any of that was 1975, when it lost the Independence Cup 0–1 to BIDC.

All of it traces back to a police sports team from the colonial period. Playing as the Police Athletic Club under British rule, the side won the Second Division as early as 1942. Partition in 1947 turned it into East Pakistan Police Athletic Club, and only after Bangladesh's independence in 1971, when the local police took over its running, did it settle into the name it still carries — Bangladesh Police, known simply as The Policemen — playing out of Shaheed Barkat Stadium in Dhaka.