Arambagh

Arifur Rahman took the ball for Arambagh in the 2017–18 Independence Cup final and left it having won the club its first major trophy and named player of the match as Arambagh beat Chittagong Abahani 2–0. It was a rare afternoon at the top for a club that had spent most of its life several floors below it.

Arambagh Krira Sangha started out in Dhaka in 1958 as a multi-sport club before football took over, and for two decades the story was one of climbing: the Dhaka Third Division title in 1970, the Second Division in 1979. Reaching the final of the ANFA Cup in Nepal in 1981 made them the first Bangladeshi club to get that far in an international competition, a distinction that sat oddly with a side still working its way up the domestic ladder at home. Three further runners-up finishes in the Federation Cup, in 1997, 2001 and 2016, kept them within sight of the trophy without quite landing it until the Independence Cup finally came in 2017–18.

The club now plays out of Manikganj rather than Dhaka, at the Shaheed Miraj–Tapan Stadium, a 5,000-capacity ground far removed from the Bangabandhu National Stadium in the capital where the bigger finals, including that one against Chittagong Abahani, were actually played. Relegation from the Bangladesh Premier League followed in 2021–22, after a spot-fixing scandal, and Arambagh dropped out of the top flight until winning promotion back to the Bangladesh Football League for 2024–25.

The nickname, the Rising Strength, has applied to the club at both ends of that arc: to a side working its way up from the Third Division in the 1970s, and to one doing much the same, again, after 2022.