Casa Sport

Nicolas Jackson left Ziguinchor for Europe before most Senegalese fans had a chance to see him play a full season for Casa Sport, and it is his name that now travels furthest from the club that first gave him a shirt. The rest of the story stayed at home, in the south of the country, where football in Casamance has long meant Casa Sport before anything else.

The club began life in 1960 as Foyer des Jeunes de Casamance, a name it carried until the early 1970s, when it became Casamance-Sporting Football Club and, in time, simply Casa Sport. It plays at Stade Aline Sitoe Diatta, in red and green, and across the same city stands its oldest problem: Olympique de Ziguinchor, the opponent in the Derby ziguinchorois, a fixture where the league table goes out of the window.

Casa Sport has taken the Senegalese league twice, in 2012 and a decade later in 2022, but its real habit has been the cup. The Coupe du Sénégal came its way in 1979, then not again until 2011, before the club won it in successive years, 2021 and 2022, a run that also brought the Coupe de la Ligue and, in 2013, the Trophée des Champions. Basile De Carvalho remains a name associated with those years, one of the players who built the club's reputation as the team to beat in the south long before Dakar's clubs had to take Ziguinchor seriously.

What Casa Sport exports now is players rather than trophies, Jackson the clearest case.