 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 practiced 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.Al-Mina'a Sports Club was formed by some of the British sailors and workers serving in the Marine Transportation Company in Basra on the banks of the Shatt Al-Arab after Mandatory Iraq, where Colonel Sir John Ward was the director of company in the 1920s.