Most South African clubs carry a place in their name, or an animal, or a word from the townships. Chippa United carries a man. The club is wholly owned by Chippa Investment Holdings, a Cape Town construction, security and cleaning company, and that company was started by Siviwe "Chippa" Mpengesi, who is still the chairman. When the club was set up in January 2010 he bought the Vodacom League franchise of Mbekweni Cosmos from Paarl for R400,000, and the name on the shirt has been his ever since. That was not a lot of money for a football club even in 2010, and it bought a place in the third tier, nothing more. Other owners in the league have put their names on things too, but usually on a stadium or a sponsor board, not on the club itself.

That makes the history of the club and the history of one businessman hard to pull apart. These days the fixture list sits on Chippa and anybody can see when the next home game is, but a list of dates does not tell you much about how the club got to where it plays. The big calls, which city, which stadium, which coach, mostly came out of one office. For a supporter that is good and bad. Things can move fast when one man decides, and they can change just as fast.

The biggest call was the move from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth before the 2014–15 season. The municipality signed the club up for Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium, with Wolfson and Gelvandale mentioned for some games, and a report from the mayor's office later put the deal at eighteen years, starting in 2014–15 and running all the way to 2031–32. For people in the bay who started following the club in that first season, eighteen years sounded like a promise that the Chilli Boys were here to stay. The first season at the bay was not easy, with some games pushed to Wolfson Stadium and a 14th-place finish, but most of the crowd from those games kept coming. Some people still talk about the Wolfson days like they were a different century.

2015, the year the stadium company held the keys

The strangest year in the whole story is 2015. For a stretch of it the club was effectively under the administration of Access Facilities and Leisure Management, the company that operates Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium. So the landlord was, more or less, running the tenant. Supporters mostly heard about it second hand, from the papers. It is the kind of arrangement that only happens at a club with one owner and no members, and it shows how thin the ground can get when money is short.

Money was short, and it showed in the next decision too. During the 2015–16 season the club announced it would take some home games to Buffalo City Stadium in East London, and the reasons given were plain: hosting at the bay stadium cost too much and not enough paying fans were coming through the gates. Funny enough, that same 2015–16 season ended with Chippa in 6th place, which is still the best finish the club has had in the Premiership. Today Buffalo City is the main home and the bay gets the night games, which is a long way from the eighteen-year plan, but the name on the shirt has not changed once.