Lusail City

Lusail has no history of grudges with Al Duhail or Al Sadd. The club plays at the 3,000-seat Al Seliah Stadium, not at the 80,000-seat arena that shares its city's name and hosted a World Cup final.

The Qatar Football Association only recognised the club in September 2019, five years after it was founded, and only then did it enter the Second Division. What followed took most of the rest of the decade. In the 2025–26 season Lusail won that division outright and earned promotion to the Qatar Stars League for 2026–27 — the first time a newly admitted club had reached the top flight since Al Duhail, then still called Lekhwiya, did it in 2011. Before that breakthrough, the closest the club had come to a trophy was a runners-up finish in the 2022 Qatari Federation Cup.

Promotion brought a change in ambition on the pitch as much as in the boardroom. Rodrigo Moreno Machado, the Spanish international striker, arrived from Al-Rayyan to lead the line in the club's first top-flight campaign.