Ethiopia Nigd Bank

The Yidnekachew Tessema Stadium in Addis Ababa holds 35,000, and it is where a bank-owned club spent seventeen years in the top flight before finding out what a title looked like. Ethiopia Nigd Bank grew out of a 1982 pooling of eleven state-owned and private banks, first playing as Banks SC. The current name arrived only after the 2023/24 season, when the club won the Ethiopian Premier League for the first time and was rechristened Ethiopia Nigd Bank in the title's honour.

That championship came on 64 points, one ahead of Mechal Sports, and it followed a spell that had nothing to do with silverware: in September 2017 the club disbanded its senior men's team along with the under-17 and under-20 sides after four poor seasons, keeping only its women's football and athletics sections running. Relegation had already taken the men's side out of the top flight that year. Promotion brought them back, and the championship followed in their first season up again.

Ghanaian midfielder Umar Basiru was central to that run, with seven goals and nine assists across 30 matches. The title also opened the door to the CAF Champions League, where The Bankers got past SC Villa, seventeen-time champions of Uganda, to reach the next round in 2024/25 — a rare continental result for a club whose earlier forays, in the Confederation Cup, had produced a win over AFC Leopards of Kenya followed by a heavy defeat to Egypt's Haras El Hodood.

Their sharpest domestic rivalry sits close to home: the 2003/04 Ethiopian Cup, the club's first major trophy, was won with a 1-0 final victory over fellow Addis Ababa side Ethiopia Bunna.