Al-Minaa

Al-Mina'a Sports Club (Arabic: نادي الميناء الرياضي‎, lit. 'Port Sports Club') is an Iraqi multi-sport club based in Al-Maqal, Basra that participates in the Iraqi Premier League, the top-flight of Iraqi football. It is one of the most popular clubs in Iraq, particularly in the south, and became the first club outside Baghdad to win the Iraqi Premier League. Al-Mina'a was founded on November 22, 1931, in Al-Maqal. In 1974, the club was merged with another club called Al-Bareed to form a single club called Al-Muwasalat, and it was a strange situation because the Al-Bareed team were based in Baghdad while Al-Mina'a were based in Basra and the two teams met in Baghdad on the day of the match only, so after just one season the club was dissolved and Al-Mina'a returned in their place. In 1978, the team won the national league title for the first time. After a lean period in the post-war years, the team finished second in the league in the 2004–05 season, and therefore qualified for the 2006 AFC Champions League, becoming the first Iraqi club from outside Baghdad to play in this tournament. For a long time, the club was considered to be one of the Iraqi football clubs that had its own style of play, and the team practised only under the supervision and training of coaches who graduated from the club, until the beginning of 2011, when the club started to depend on foreign coaches.