Thimphu City

Changlimithang Stadium sits at the centre of Thimphu's sporting life, and Thimphu City FC has played there without interruption since it took shape in 2012. The club did not start from nothing: it grew out of Zimdra FC, which had itself emerged from Drukstar FC and finished runner-up in the A-Division in both 2011 and 2012, and the rebrand arrived just as the Bhutan Football Federation restructured the domestic game into a National League. Before that, keeping the side afloat fell largely to one man — owner Hishey Tshering paid player salaries out of his own pocket in the years before 2013.

Since then the club has not finished outside the top three in any competition it has entered, winning the Bhutan Premier League in 2016 and 2020 and finishing second five times, most recently in 2025. Continental football has proved harder: a 2017 AFC Cup debut ended in a 0–3 aggregate defeat to Club Valencia of the Maldives, and a second preliminary-round exit followed against Club Eagles in 2021. Domestically, no fixture carries more weight than the Thimphu Derby against Thimphu FC.

The name most tied to the club's rise is Chencho Gyeltshen, Bhutan's all-time leading scorer for the national team, who joined in 2017 and scored 30 goals in just 14 matches that season before returning for a second spell in 2023–24.