Nelson Suburbs

The Southern Football League title in 2019 came a year after Nelson Suburbs stepped up into that competition, and it followed a run of three Mainland Premier League titles in 2004, 2005 and 2008. Between those two spells the club had been climbing for decades: into the Central League in 1978, the National League in 1996, and the South Island league in 1999, before the Mainland Premier League arrived in 2000.

The Chatham Cup, New Zealand's national knockout competition, has brought them close twice. In 2008, the same year as their last Mainland title, they reached the semi-finals and lost 2–1 to East Coast Bays. Ten years later they went out at the same stage, 2–0 to Birkenhead United.

The club began in 1962 as a merger of two local sides, Hospital and Waimea College Old Boys, and it kept the light blue the fans call "Sky", with navy. Its ground, Saxton Field in Stoke, holds about 6,000 people. The other Nelson club, FC Nelson, is the opponent in the Nelson derby, sometimes called the Suburbs derby.

The club has produced and hosted players who went on to wider careers. Riki van Steeden, a New Zealand international, played his early football there. Commins Menapi, the all-time leading goalscorer for the Solomon Islands, spent 1999 and 2000 with the club. Ben Wright, an English forward, ran the side as player-coach from 2012 to 2018. An academy opened in 2020 to feed the first team.

The national cup is still the gap. Two semi-final exits, a decade apart, are as far as Suburbs have gone in it, and no Chatham Cup final has yet been played by the club.