Ethnikos Achna

Relegation has become a habit at Achna. The 2025-26 campaign ended with a 13th-place finish out of fourteen in the Cypriot First Division, sending Ethnikos Achna back down to the second tier for the fourth time in club history — a pattern that has defined the club as much as anything it has won.

The village side first reached the top flight in 1983 and went straight back down. That opening lesson repeated itself twice more: promotion followed by relegation, then a return, then years of holding on before dropping out again. Between those spells, though, Achna managed a run in the First Division that lasted from 1992 until 2018 — twenty-six years in which a club from a village side pushed as high as fourth place, in 1994-95, 1997-98 and 2006-07, without ever quite forcing its way into the country's established order.

2006 stands apart. Achna went through the UEFA Intertoto Cup that summer, beating Partizani Tirana, Osijek and Maccabi Petah Tikva to reach the final round, where the format of the competition declared them joint winners and pushed them into the UEFA Cup. They were named Cyprus's Sports Team of the Year for it. The European run itself ended quickly — Roeselare beaten comfortably, then Lens too strong in the first round proper, Achna drawing at home in a match played at the GSP Stadium in Nicosia before losing away — but for a club whose honours otherwise read as three Second Division titles and two lost Cup finals, that summer remains the one time Achna's name travelled beyond the island.

Valdas Ivanauskas took charge in 2016, arriving with a reputation built as a striker for Lithuania rather than as a coach, and stayed through 2017 — one entry among several short managerial stints at a club whose survival, promotion and relegation have each come and gone faster than most projects had time to settle.