Penang FC

City Stadium in George Town holds up to 20,000, sitting under the name most locals still shorten to Stadium Bandaraya, and it has been the address for a club old enough to have watched Malaysian football take its current shape around it.

Penang FC traces its line back to 1921, when the Football Association of Penang was formally set up, making it the oldest club still operating in the country. For most of that history it played and won as a state team; the switch to Penang FC came only in 2020, after privatisation turned a federation-run side into a club in the modern sense, and that same year it took the Malaysia Premier League title.

The honours from the earlier decades sit oddly with a spell in the third tier. Four Malaysia Cups came between 1953 and 1974, and three top-flight championships followed in 1982, 1998 and 2001, along with an FA Cup in 2002. Then in 2011 Penang dropped to the third division, a relegation that had not been part of the club's story before and that it took years to reverse.

Northern Region derbies against Kedah Darul Aman carry the weight of that history whenever the two meet; neither side treats it as a routine fixture.

Among those who wore the shirt, Mohd Faiz Subri is the name that travelled furthest beyond Penang. A free kick he bent in during a 2016 league match won him the FIFA Puskás Award the following year, the first Malaysian, and the first player from the AFC, to take the prize.