Mekelakeya

These days Mekelakeya sits some way short of the position its cabinet suggests it should occupy, chasing Saint George rather than pushing them. The name that appears on team sheets is Defence Force SC, a reminder that the club grew out of the Ethiopian army and still carries that link in its bearing.

The trophy count explains why supporters expect more than they currently see. Eleven league titles, the last of them in 1989, and fourteen Ethiopian Cups, the most recent arriving in 2018, place Mekelakeya second only to Saint George in the country's history. Those cup wins in 2006, 2013, 2015 and 2018 matter more than the league drought: they show a club still capable of winning something, even as the championship has slipped away for over three decades.

The club has gone by several names along the way, and its nickname TORU sits alongside looser tags fans and journalists have used over the years, among them "Sleeping Giant" — a label that reads less like affection than like a diagnosis. Games are played at Addis Ababa Stadium, a 20,000-capacity ground the club shares with the wait for something bigger: a new 60,000-seat stadium is under construction, due for completion in 2027.

Continental football has come in short bursts rather than sustained runs — the African Cup of Champions Clubs in 1977, the Cup Winners' Cup in 1976, and two appearances in the CAF Confederation Cup, in 2007 and 2017. Saint George remains the club's old rival, even without a fixed derby name attached to the meetings between them, and every look at the honours board returns to the same gap: no championship since 1989.