ES Metlaoui

Phosphate money built Métlaoui, and the club took its shape from the mining town around it: the colours and the nickname, Lions of the Mines , all trace back to the pits that gave the place a reason to exist. Founded in 1950, ES Métlaoui spent most of its life shuttling through the lower divisions of Tunisian football, and its honours board reads accordingly — five titles in the second tier between 1956 and 2013, three more in the third, two in the fourth.

Brahim Harrath is still spoken of as the best player the club has produced, even as the current squad has taken on a different look with recruits such as the Beninese international Irénée Glèlè.

That promotion, secured for the 2024–2025 season, followed one first earned in 2013, and both came without a repeat of the Tunisian Cup runs of the 1960s and 1970s, when Métlaoui reached the quarter-finals and, in 1974, the semi-finals. What the club has never managed, across all those divisional titles, is a domestic cup, and Ligue 1 survival now sits as the more immediate test.