Herentals

Innocent Benza turned up for Zimbabwe Premier Soccer League matches well into his fifties, leading the line as Herentals' captain and striker while also sitting in parliament as the member for Mutasa Central. He owns the club he plays for, and for a stretch shared the pitch with his own son, Tinotenda "Tino" Benza, who has since taken over the captain's armband and much of the goalscoring himself.

The club grew out of the Herentals Group of Colleges, a Harare institution founded in 1999, and was set up in 2011 by Innocent and his twin brother, Gerald, to give the schools' students an outlet in organised football — hence the nickname, The Students. Promotion to the Premier Soccer League came in 2018, with a squad of teenagers, mostly drawn from the college system, coached by another brother, Paul Benza.

Herentals has sat in the lower half of the table ever since, without a men's honour to its name, though the women's side, Herentals Queens, took the national league title in both 2022 and 2023. The 2025/2026 season brought a match-fixing verdict against the club, with relegation and bans for officials among the penalties handed down.

Without a settled ground of its own, the team has shuttled between Rufaro Stadium and the National Sports Stadium in Harare, both holding around 60,000, and has occasionally taken games as far afield as Kariba and Zvishavane when neither was free. Purple shirts mark them out at home, white on the road.

Promotion battles have repeatedly put Herentals on the opposite side from Scotland FC, known locally as Scotland Mabvuku — the closest thing the club has to a settled rival in Harare's lower and mid-table scraps.