Al Ahli Doha

The club that became Al Ahli started life in Doha in 1950 under a different name, Al-Najah, and it has the distinction of being the oldest football club in Qatar. The name it carries now, along with the green and white, dates from 1972 — a change of identity rather than a change of institution, and the club has answered to Al Ameed, the Brigadier, ever since.

The trophies that matter came in the two decades after that. Al Ahli won the Emir Cup in 1973, then again in 1981, 1987 and 1992, and nothing has followed it. Since the last of those, the record reads mostly of near misses: runners-up in the Sheikh Jassem Cup in 1979 and 1980, then again in 1998 and 2005, each time finishing the season without the thing they came for.

Meshal Abdullah is the player the club counts by. The Qatari striker came and went three times between 1999 and 2019 and left with 120 league goals. Dioko Kaluyituka, the Congolese forward, scored 60 in four seasons from 2011. Later signings drew more attention than they returned — Julian Draxler arrived from Paris Saint-Germain in 2023 and played ten matches.

Hamad bin Khalifa Stadium holds 12,000.

The 2012 season ended with the Qatari Second Division title, which is to say the club had to win its way back up. The Qatar Stars League remains the gap in the cabinet: Al Ahli have never been champions of Qatar, and the wait since that 1992 cup keeps stretching.