Defence Force

The Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force put its football team in Port of Spain. The side is drawn from serving soldiers and coast guardsmen of the army and the coast guard. That is the unusual part.

The team was formally constituted in 1974. It had already won it in 1972 and 1973. Through the 1970s and 1980s the title barely left them — nine in the first decade alone, then a further run through the 1990s that ended in 1999. Twenty-six national championships in all, the most recent in 2026.

The years that carry furthest are 1978 and 1985, when Defence Force won the CONCACAF Champions' Cup. No Caribbean club has managed that often. The 1985 side took the regional title in the same season it took the domestic one and the FA Trophy. A CFU Club Championship followed in 2001, and the club has kept turning up in the Caribbean Club Championship and the Club Shield since.

After 1999 the trophies thinned out. The Pro League titles of 2011 and 2013 came a decade apart, and the cups in between — the First Citizens Cup, the Digicel Pro Bowl — filled the gap. Then 2020, then 2023, then two more.

The yellow shirt with blue trim is a Port of Spain fixture, which is the root of the fiercest of the domestic meetings: the other big clubs of the capital and the wider league have spent fifty years measuring themselves against a team that keeps coming back, and rarely goes long without a title.