Mara Sugar

Promotion arrived at Mara Sugar despite a defeat. On 30 June 2024 the club lost 1-2 to Vihiga Bullets in its final National Super League fixture, and still finished top of the table, having already banked enough points across the season to be crowned champions and sent up to the FKF Premier League for the first time. Three years earlier, in 2021, the club had gone up from the Division One National League, and the two promotions together carried it from the lower reaches of Kenyan football into the top flight.

Founded in 2012 by workers at the Trans Mara Sugar Company, which still owns and backs the side, the club carries that origin into its nickname, The Cane Millers. Home matches are played at the Sony Awendo Green Stadium, a 5,000-capacity ground in Migori County that belongs not to Mara Sugar but to Sony Sugar Company, once the parent of a separate local rival, Sony Sugar FC, before that club was disbanded.

Head coach Benedict Wanjala took the team through the title-winning campaign, working alongside technical director Boniface Ambani, himself a former Kenyan international. In the second tier, matches against Shabana FC had already been marked out as the "NSL Derby" by the Shabana coach Sammy "Pamzo" Omollo, a fixture that gave Mara Sugar's rise a running subplot even before the promotion was secured with a 4-0 win over Silibwet FC.

None of it traces back further than a group of sugar-company employees deciding, in 2012, to put a team together.