Al Ahly

On the night of 1 February 2012, home supporters stormed the pitch after a league match in Port Said against Al-Masry, and by the time the stadium gates gave way, 74 Al Ahly fans lay dead. It remains the darkest evening in the club's history, and it fell on an institution that had never been just a football team. In 1907 Omar Lotfy and a group of Cairo schoolboys founded Al Ahly as a gathering place for young Egyptians opposed to British rule, and for years the game mattered less than the politics behind it.

The red shirts that gave the club its nickname, the Red Devils, date from that founding generation, and little else about Al Ahly has stayed as modest. No club in Egypt has come close to its record in the domestic league, and none on the African continent has matched its haul of continental titles: twelve wins in the CAF Champions League, the first in 1982, the most recent stretch running from 2020 to 2024 without a gap. Cairo International Stadium, where the club draws crowds near its 75,000 capacity, has staged most of that history, though Al Ahly moved training and some fixtures to a purpose-built ground in Al Salam City in 2020.

Zamalek supplies the one rivalry that still empties the rest of the city on derby day, a fixture played with a needle no league table can explain. Mahmoud El Khatib, once a player for the club, took over as president in 2017 and has overseen a run of titles that shows no sign of slowing. But the name still most associated with Al Ahly on the pitch belongs to Hossam Hassan, whose 109 goals for the club have never been approached by anyone who came after him.