NorthEast United

Asamoah Gyan arrived at NorthEast United in 2019 with a Ghana captain's armband. He was the club's third marquee signing after Joan Capdevila and Simão Sabrosa, part of a pattern: a team built to represent all eight states of Northeast India kept reaching abroad for a name to put on the shirt while it worked out what to build at home.

That construction took time. NorthEast United reached the ISL playoff final twice, in 2018–19 and again in 2020–21, and lost both. The breakthrough, when it came, was in a different competition: the Durand Cup, where the club beat Mohun Bagan Super Giant on penalties in the 2024 final after a 2-2 draw, its first major trophy in ten years of trying. It defended the title in 2025 against Diamond Harbour, the first side in more than three decades to retain the Durand Cup.

By then the more interesting names were coming from the club's own academy rather than the transfer market. Seiminlen Doungel scored the first hat-trick by an Indian player in ISL history while at the club, and Lalengmawia was named the league's Emerging Player of the Year in 2020–21 — evidence that the mandate John Abraham and Shillong Lajong FC set out with in 2014 had started to produce its own players rather than only import finished ones.

Home games at the Indira Gandhi Athletic Stadium in Guwahati now carry the weight of the Eastern India Derby against Odisha FC and a fixture against Kerala Blasters that has lost none of its needle. Both trace back to the same idea Gyan was signed to front.