Ittifaq

Ross Pelligra took over an Al-Ittifaq side sitting in the UAE Second Division in January 2025, and within a matter of months a club whose home ground is a school pitch inside Al Mamzar Beach Park was fielding Mario Balotelli. The Australian businessman, who already owned Catania in Italy's Serie C and Perth Glory in the A-League, brought Al-Ittifaq into a partnership with AC ChievoVerona, and the signings that followed — Balotelli, Douglas Costa, Daniele Baselli — arrived at a ground that seats 550.

The club itself dates only to 2020, set up by NASS Sports and entered straight into the Second Division for the 2020/21 season in yellow and blue. Promotion to the First Division came in 2024–25 after Al-Ittifaq finished third and the actual champions, Elite Falcons, withdrew. Paolo Montero, once of Juventus, was appointed head coach in February 2026, taking charge of a squad built around the ChievoVerona pipeline and UAE internationals such as Saif Al-Romaithi and Hamad Al-Marzouqi.

The academy is where the ChievoVerona link is meant to pay off longer term, with Italian coaching input folded into the development of local players rather than just the first-team roster. Al-Ittifaq has no honours to point to yet, and no nickname has really stuck — the name itself means "the union" or "the agreement," which reads oddly for a club still working out who it is.

What it does have, now that it plays First Division football, is Dubai for company: Dubai City and Emirates Club sit in the same division and the same city, and matches against either carry the weight of that shared postcode even without a derby name attached to them.