Al Merreikh

A football club took shape in 1908 under the name Al-Maslamah. It carried that name for nineteen years before becoming Al-Merrikh in 1927.

The tally of domestic titles runs to twenty league championships and nineteen Sudan Cups, spread across seven decades from the first league win in 1970 to the most recent, in 2025–26. Continental success has been rarer but not absent: the African Cup Winners' Cup, taken in 1989 with a 1–0 aggregate win over Bendel United, remains the club's high point outside Sudan, and a runners-up finish in the 2007 CAF Confederation Cup, lost to CS Sfaxien, is the closest they have come since.

Boraî Bashir belongs to the club's earliest continental memory rather than its trophy cabinet: a defender on the books from 1951 to 1964, he scored Sudan's first-ever goal at the Africa Cup of Nations in 1957. The rivalry that has defined the club domestically runs across the same city, against Al-Hilal — the Omdurman Derby, which Sudanese football treats as its central fixture regardless of where either side stands in a given season.

Home matches belonged to the Al-Merrikh Stadium, known locally as the Red Castle, until Sudan's civil war forced the club to play its fixtures in Rwanda instead. The ground itself is currently closed for reconstruction, with capacity due to rise well past its old 43,000. Whatever comes of that rebuilding, the club now waiting to return home is the same one that started as a handful of Sudanese footballers organising themselves in 1908, in a city under someone else's garrison.