Young Star

The fixtures that tell you most about Young Star FC are the domestic ones — trips to face Kayanza United and Ngozi City FC, opponents drawn from the same pool of Burundian sides that make up the top flight. What there is instead is the league itself: Ligue A, which carries the name Primus League from its sponsor and is known abroad as the Burundi Premier League.

That is where Young Star play, and the fact of being in it is the substantial thing about the club. Burundi's first division has been contested since 1963. The roll of national champions across those decades does not include Young Star, and neither does any accounting of the country's most successful sides, where Vital'O FC and Inter FC take up most of the room.

Beyond the results, the club keeps a low profile. Its home ground is not listed anywhere in the usual football databases — the entry simply reads as undetermined, and so does the city the club plays out of. No capacity figure, no colours on record, no nickname in circulation.

What Young Star have not managed, in a league that has been running for more than sixty years, is a title, or a place in the shorter list of clubs that have come close.