Al Ittihad Kalba

Seven times, Al Ittihad Kalba have won the UAE Division One title, though each of those campaigns — 1979–80, 1988–89, 1995–96, 1998–99, 2009–10, 2011–12 and 2013–14 — ended the same way: promotion, then a return trip down. The top flight has never yielded a trophy. In the Pro League, Kalba have mostly sat in the lower half of the table, and the closest they have come to a run at silverware since was the 2020–21 League Cup, where they reached the semi-final before Al Nasr took it on penalties after the two legs finished level.

The club was formed in Kalba, a town on the Gulf of Oman coast that belongs to the emirate of Sharjah. That geography is what gives the club its fiercest fixture: Sharjah FC lie roughly 116 kilometres away, on the other coast, yet the meeting is still billed as the Sharjah Emirate Derby, because both clubs answer to the same emirate rather than the same postcode.

Kalba play in yellow and black — a yellow shirt with black sleeves at home, all black away, with an all-red third kit — and their ground, Ittihad Kalba Club Stadium, holds a few thousand spectators, modest even by the standards of the league.

Of the men who have taken charge of the team, Jorge Da Silva is the more recent name attached to it, the Brazilian in the dugout through the 2021 season that included that League Cup run to the semi-final.