Tomorrow, Sporting take on FC Porto at the Estádio do Dragão in an uncommon position. For the first time in decades, the Lions will start the match at the home of their northern rivals as strong favourites to win. That has almost never been the case in the modern football era, and results clearly reflect Porto’s domination of the Lisbon club whenever the two teams met outside of Alvalade.

The backdrop made a Parisian spring night in 1996 even more special for Sporting fans.

Strap up for another journey with PortuGOAL’s resident football historian Miguel Lourenço Pereira, who takes back to 1996 and a match that was a one-off in many ways for the Portuguese football… played in the French capital. 

On Wednesday Sporting play their final match of the league phase of the new Champions League format against Italian outfit Bologna. The Portuguese team may be favoured to obtain a positive result this week, but going back over three decades when the two teams last met in European competition – at a time when Italian sides were head and shoulders above all other nations when it came to club football – that certainly was not the case.

Nevertheless, the Lions scored a famous victory over the Seria A team. Miguel Lourenço Pereira takes us back to 1991 and a memorable night at the José Alvalade stadium. 

Sporting supporters have not enjoyed as many European glory nights as their Big Three rivals FC Porto and SL Benfica. Their historical peak came a few years before the continental tournaments kickstarted and despite the brilliant win in the 1964 Cup Winners Cup edition, few were the memorable matches played along the way until now.

But that doesn’t mean there weren’t any, even if most supporters tended to forget the times when the Leões were able to perform at a level worthy of their domestic history. In 1990/91 there was no bigger feat than to put an Italian side to shame. It was a season when the UEFA Cup was played out by two Italian sides, at a time when Italian teams played usually one, two or even the three continental finals in the same season, sometimes against each other. That makes 20 March 1991 an even more special night. The never-ending roar of the Lions at the old Alvalade is still echoing in eternity. 

Zinedine Zidane played his European debut in Portugal. That could be the perfect start for any football story. Only, for once, the French genius is not the main character in this tale. In fact, his debut on the continental arena – one he would dominate – pales in comparison with the other big story of that night of September 1991.

Fifteen months before Sport Comércio and Salgueiros played in the Portuguese second tier. Seven years prior they still hosted sides on a dirt pitch, having been the last club to ever play in a Portuguese first division stadium without a grass turf. They were as small as you could get, despite their brilliant history as a resistance club ever since the 1920s, and here they were, debuting in the UEFA Cup against all the odds.

Could it get any better than that? What about winning your first-ever European match how does that look like? For the Alma Salgueirista it was pure heaven. 

Tomorrow FC Porto travel to Gil Vicente in the first match of the segunda volta (second lap) of what is proving a trying season for the Dragons, their new president André Villas-Boas and their new coach Vítor Bruno. It is a far cry from where the club were a quarter of a century ago, as Porto chased their SIXTH Portuguese championship title in a row.

However, Porto would be stunned by a Gil Vicente side in rude health. Football historian Miguel Lourenço Pereira takes us on another trip down memory line to the day the “Bi-Tri” died...

Nobody in Portuguese football had ever won five league titles in a row. No one did afterwards. In May of 1999 FC Porto touched the sky winning at the José Alvalade stadium to end the myth that winning five couldn’t be done.

Of course, at that time the only other side ever able to claim four league titles in a row – the so-called Tetra – had been the famed Sporting of the Cinco Violinos back in the early 1950s, so winning league title number five at the Lions’ home ground was special. Even more so because the first league title of that historic sequence, back in 1995, had been precisely won at that same ground.