Kuching City FC: Sarawak's Rising Force

The best story in Malaysian club football right now is being written 1,000 kilometres from Kuala Lumpur, across the South China Sea. Kuching City FC — the Cats — went from founding in 2015 to Super League runners-up, a first Malaysia Cup final and a historic AFC Champions League Two place inside a decade. Here’s how Sarawak built a contender.

From nothing to second place in ten years

Kuching City were founded in 2015, in a state whose football history had been carried by the old Sarawak FA sides. The new club climbed the pyramid methodically — semi-pro tiers, promotion, consolidation — and reached the Super League as an organised, unglamorous operation few in the Peninsula took seriously.

The 2025/26 season ended the anonymity. The Cats finished second in the Malaysia Super League with 53 points — 16 wins, five draws, three defeats — one point ahead of Selangor, behind only the untouchable champions. A 1–0 win over Kuala Lumpur City in round 26 sealed it, and with it qualification for the AFC Champions League Two for the first time in the club’s existence: continental football, in Kuching.

The first final: 23 May 2026

Two weeks after sealing second place, Kuching City walked out at Bukit Jalil for the first major final in their history — the Piala Malaysia decider against JDT. For an hour they made the champions uncomfortable, pressing with the fearlessness of a team with nothing to defend. JDT’s class told late: 2–0, goals from Marcos Guilherme and Arif Aiman in stoppage time.

Defeat, but the useful kind. Every serious Malaysian club’s history has a “first final” chapter, usually lost; what matters is what the club does with the standing it earns. Kuching City left Bukit Jalil as the second-best team in the country by every available measure — and East Malaysia’s first genuine national contender in a generation.

Why this matters beyond Sarawak

Malaysian football has a geography problem: money, media and titles concentrate in the Peninsula. The Super League’s modern era has been a west-coast story with Borneo as travel inconvenience. Kuching City breaking into the top two — with Sabah also established in the top flight, and the Borneo derby between them now a fixture with real stakes — redistributes relevance eastward for the first time in decades.

Sarawak’s political leadership has leaned in publicly, declaring the era of the “kampung champion” over and setting continental ambition as the target. Whether that translates into sustained funding is the question that will decide if 2025/26 was a peak or a beginning.

The Borneo derby and the Cats’ support

Kuching City’s rise has transformed East Malaysian football’s social calendar. The Borneo derby against Sabah — once a mid-table curiosity — is now a fixture between two established top-flight clubs with genuinely different identities: Sabah’s longer professional pedigree against Kuching’s insurgent momentum. Flights across the South China Sea fill with travelling support in both directions, something Peninsula fixtures rarely manage.

The home support has scaled with the results. Sarawak’s football public, starved of national relevance since the old Sarawak FA sides faded, adopted the Cats fully during the 2025/26 run — league fixtures drawing crowds that outnumbered several Peninsula clubs’ cup nights. The club leaned in, and the state’s distinct identity (its own immigration rules, its own political weight within Malaysia) gives the support a nationalist edge unique in the league: when Kuching City play in Kuala Lumpur, it reads as Sarawak playing the Peninsula.

For the neutral, this is the healthiest thing in Malaysian football: a second pole of genuine feeling, far from the JDT machine and the Klang Valley establishment.

The 2026/27 test: fighting on three fronts

The Cats now face the classic over-achiever’s season: a Super League campaign to prove second place wasn’t variance, a continental debut in the AFC Champions League Two, and domestic cups where their new status makes them a scalp. Squad depth, not quality, is the usual failure mode — continental Tuesdays have exhausted better-resourced debutants than Kuching.

The realistic definition of success: top four domestically, competitive in the ACL Two group, and retention of the core that got them here against Peninsula clubs’ chequebooks. Manage that, and Malaysian football has a genuine second force — something it has lacked through the entire JDT era.