Peerless

Peerless play their home matches in the Calcutta Football League across two grounds, neither of which belongs to them.

The club came out of the Peerless Group, a Kolkata business house that put money behind a side and sent it to train on the Maidan under Shabbir Ali. That was 1993, and the Second Division title arrived in the same year. A third-place finish in the Premier Division followed in 1996-97, then a long stretch in which the club won the Trades Cup in 2006.

Then 2018-19, when they finished second, and 2019-20, when they did not. Peerless took the Calcutta Football League — the first club outside East Bengal, Mohun Bagan and Mohammedan to win it in 61 years, since Eastern Railway in 1958. The three Kolkata giants had made the competition their private property for six decades.

They followed it with a quarter-final run in the IFA Shield in 2020. The blue home shirt and the white change strip remain, as does the absence of a nickname: in match reports the club is Peerless, or PSC, and nothing more. The task now is the one the 2019-20 season set — to show that a title won outside the big three was not a one-off.