Pontypridd Town

Aberystwyth Town has been the one that matters most on the Pontypridd calendar in recent seasons, the two sides trading places between Cymru South and the league below it, with promotion and relegation adding an edge that friendlier fixtures don't carry.

The club itself came out of a merger, Ynysybwl FC joining with Pontypridd Sports & Social Club to form what was first known as Pontypridd & Ynysybwl FC before the Pontypridd Town name settled in 1992. For years the team played at Ynysangharad Park, inside the war memorial grounds that gave the town's football a fixed home. That ended in 2017, when Rhondda Cynon Taf council turned down plans to redevelop the ground and the club moved three miles out to the USW Sports Park in Treforest, a rented facility that holds 1,000 and remains the home venue. A season later, needing a Tier 2 licence to play in Welsh Football League Division One, the club spent a spell twelve miles away at Leckwith Stadium before returning to Treforest.

Two league titles anchor the record: Welsh Football League Division Two in 2005–06, won with 26 wins from 34 games, and Division Three a decade later, in 2015–16. Neither matched what followed in 2021–22, when a runner-up finish in Cymru South sent the club into the Cymru Premier for the first time, the top flight of Welsh football reached only after thirty years of climbing through the divisions below it. In June 2022 the club renamed itself Pontypridd United, a change made to reflect a wider catchment of support beyond the town itself, though the football club's legal identity remains Pontypridd Town Football Club Limited.

Owain Jones, a Swansea City academy product, is the name attached to the club's biggest league leap: in that first Cymru Premier campaign he scored the team's opening goal in the competition, in a 2-1 win over Aberystwyth Town.