Vittoriosa Stars

The De La Salle Ground holds about a thousand people, a figure that has kept Vittoriosa Stars a neighbourhood concern rather than a Premier League name through most of its history; the club plays in Birgu, one of the Three Cities, and shares that cramped stretch of the Cottonera with St. George's, a mile or so away in Cospicua. What the two grounds are close enough to produce is a derby the locals call, plainly, the Cospicua–Birgu derby. It had gone the Reds' way rarely enough that a 5–2 win over St. George's in 2019 was described at the time as their first in years.

Founded in 1906, the club spent most of the twentieth century in Malta's lower divisions, and its one clearly documented honour belongs there too: the Second Division Knock-Out Cup, won in 1985–86. Two runner-up finishes followed much later and at a higher level — the First Division in 2012–13 and the FA Trophy in 2009–10, lost to Valletta. That FA Trophy final sits awkwardly next to the same season's Premier League, from which Vittoriosa Stars were excluded after a match-fixing scandal.

The playing staff since has leaned on imports and academy graduates alike: Ramon dos Santos arrived in 2012 having just been named Defender of the Year, and Kenneth Scicluna, a Malta international, joined two years later. Neither matches the sort of loyalty measured out by Christian Cassar, a goalkeeper who reached 200 senior appearances for the club in the 2022–23 season — the kind of number that, at a ground this size, tends to mean more than a trophy.