Al-Nassr

The fixture that matters at Al-Awwal Park is the Riyadh derby against Al-Hilal; matches against Al-Shabab and Al-Ahli carry their own weight.

Al-Nassr was founded on 24 October 1955 by the Al-Jaba brothers, who ran the first training sessions on a patch of ground in the Ghashlat al-Shorta district of Riyadh. The nickname Faris Najd — Knight of Najd, the region around the capital — is one of two. The other nickname, Al-Aalami, the Worldwide Club, points to something the trophy list backs up: a run into continental football that most Saudi sides of the era never managed, capped by the Asian Cup Winners' Cup and Asian Super Cup, both won in 1998.

Domestically, nine league titles span four decades, from 1974-75 to 2018-19. Majed Abdullah, who scored 260 goals for the club, remains the reference point for anyone judging a forward at Al-Nassr; Abderrazak Hamdallah later became the club's most prolific foreign signing. The arrival of Cristiano Ronaldo in 2022 reset the terms of comparison again, and the squad built around him — Sadio Mané, Aymeric Laporte, Marcelo Brozović — turned Al-Nassr into a fixture of the transfer pages in a way the club's history had not previously produced. The 2023 Arab Club Champions Cup followed.

Al-Awwal Park, formerly known as King Saud University Stadium and later Mrsool Park, holds 25,000. Plans call for expansion to 46,000 by 2034, a scale the current ground, tucked into the university campus on the edge of Riyadh, was never built for.