SC Villa

Kampala derby day still carries risk that has nothing to do with the scoreline. SC Villa's meetings with Express FC have produced a fatal riot in 1985 and, in 2015, a match abandoned outright after crowd violence — the kind of history that makes the fixture a fact of Ugandan football rather than just a rivalry.

No other club in the country has matched what Villa built through the 1980s and 1990s: seventeen league titles, the first run of them coming in 1982 and stretching in near-unbroken sequence through 2004, with nine Uganda Cups layered on top. In 1986 the club took the league and cup together, and by 2002 it had done the double six times over. That period also carried Villa beyond Uganda's borders — a run to the final of the Sekou Toure Cup, the forerunner of the CAF Champions League, in 1991, lost to Club Africain of Tunisia, followed by another final the next year in the CAF Cup.

Then the trophies stopped. Boardroom disputes and repeated changes of leadership pulled the club into a cycle it could not easily break, and two decades passed without a league title. The wait ended in the 2023–24 season, when Villa were champions again.

They play now at Kadiba Stadium, a 7,000-capacity ground finished in 2025, a switch from the old Nakivubo Stadium that had been home for so much of the club's history. Kadiba sits a long way from where it all started, in the mid-1970s, when the side first took shape under the name Nakivubo Boys, before Patrick Kawooya's chairmanship reshaped it into Sports Club Villa.