Minerva Punjab

Ranjit Bajaj set up the club in 2005 as a football academy in Chandigarh, and the name Minerva Academy stuck to that idea long before the senior side meant anything nationally. Promotion to the I-League in 2016 brought the switch to Minerva Punjab, and the academy tag survived only as a nickname, The Factory, a reminder of what the club still saw as its real business even after it started winning.

That business paid off in the 2017–18 season, when Minerva Punjab took the I-League title and, across its various age groups, won every national youth honour on offer that year, from under-13 to under-18. Chencho Gyeltshen led the scoring in the title-winning campaign, while Arshdeep Singh came through the academy itself, the kind of graduate the whole project had been built to produce. A year later the club added the Punjab State Super League, and it shared the J&K Invitational Cup with Real Kashmir.

Matches were played at Guru Nanak Stadium, though top-flight fixtures sometimes had to move elsewhere when the ground fell short of league licensing rules. East Bengal and Churchill Brothers were the games that mattered most on the pitch, without ever settling into a named rivalry.

The academy project did not stop at results. Further rebrandings followed — first a partnership that renamed the club Punjab FC, then a spell as RoundGlass Punjab FC — before it returned to Punjab FC on promotion to the Indian Super League. Four youth titles in one season, at every age level running up to the seniors, is not a number most academies in the country can match.