The rise of Aris Limasol
Aris Limasol was founded in 3rd of October 1930. At first the club was working as a band. Eventually after some years it also created a football department. Aris was a club for the high class people of Limassol so as a football club it never had a lot of fans unlike the two big teams of the city AEL and Apollon. Aris was one of the clubs that was going up and down the divisions all the time. The biggest success the club had seen was a cup final in 1989 against AEL. Aris was called “Aroulis” as a joke from other Cypriot football fans because they always found a way to send him down when needed.
In 2018 2 games before the playoffs Aris was relegated after 4 years in the top flight division following a defeat to relegation rival Olympiakos Nicosia at Tsirio. In 2018-2019 season Aris just missed on promotion finishing 3rd 1 point behind second place(1st + 2nd went up) making the president of the club for many years Mr Dimosthenous resign from his position. At 2019-2020 even though Aris started the season poorly he had an amazing run of wins from winter and onwards climbing all the way to 3rd and this is where bad luck knocks aris door. With covid coming in Aris was 2 points behind 2nd place Ermis who was in a terrible form with 1 draw in 5 but because of covid the league got postponed. Cyprus football association decided the first 2 teams to go up which meant aris missed out on promotion. So entering the 2020-2021 season Aris was for the 3rd time trying to get promotion to the 1st division. Aris started the season well being between the first places for most of the first half of the season and showed that it would have been one of the clubs that was going to fight for promotion but in the first days of 2021 things change for the better for Aris. Aris announced the agreement with a Russian investor and that is where the rise begins. With some signings in January Aris finished 2nd behind first place Paek and confirmed his promotion after 3 years. In summer aris made some statement signings like Stepinski, Vana Alves and with the great scouting network they had they also brought some very exciting unknown at that time youngsters. Result of that? Aris a newly promoted team fighting for Europe. However in February following some bad results aris went and sacked Liasos Louka the manager of the team and replaced him with a friend of the owner the young leukorussian Aleksey Shpilevski. Shpilevski is a difficult character to control and a very aggressive manager and that is shown in aris way of playing. He got aris to the first group for the first time in the club’s history( top 6 is group A) where even though aris found it difficult to stay in the race for the title still remained close to 5th place which would take the club to Europe for the first time in its history.
21/5/2022 Anorthosis hosts Aris at Antonis Papadopulos for the last game of the season. Aris had to win to qualify for Europe while Anorthosis with a draw confirmed 4th place and European football for next season. Yago at the 44th minute gave aris the lead leaving Anorthosis fans frozen. Second half Aris had absolute control over the game and in the space of 7 minutes Spojaric scored twice to make it 0-3 for the Limassol team making history as Aris was in Europe for the first ever time in 92 years.