Portuguese Football in English
To kick off our Book Corner section of the site, we bring you A Journey Through Portuguese Football, the most in-depth English-language book ever written on Portuguese football, penned by members of the PortuGOAL.net team and some very special guest authors.
For a detailed description of the book, the introduction is reproduced below.
Answer the question at the bottom of the page to be in with a chance of winning the book. We are giving away three copies to the competition winners.
1999 was a year of mixed feelings for the people of Aveiro. Yes, they celebrated the local club’s first major silverware as Beira-Mar came out on top against Campomaiorense to claim the Portuguese Cup in a surprise final at Jamor, but they had also been relegated to Division Two weeks earlier.
A decade earlier, however, football was finally starting to reconnect with one of the country’s most often forgotten districts at a moment when Aveiro itself was beginning to climb from oblivion, taking the right steps to become what it is today: one of the most vibrant and modern mid-sized cities in the country.
During those years, the yellow and black colours of Beira-Mar put the city on the map once again, not only by returning to the first division after years of absence but also by playing in their first-ever cup final. That memorable football shirt became forever intertwined with those golden years of the Alvinegros as well as part of the popular culture of the 1990s.
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Despite having been founded in the early 1920s and having counted briefly with Eusébio in their ranks in the mid-1970s, few events had made Sport Club Beira-Mar a memorable force in Portuguese football. They weren’t the first club from their district to be promoted to the top tier, and for some time they weren’t even the best side in a region that also included the likes of Sporting Espinho, Feirense, Oliveirense, Águeda, Ovarense and Sanjoanense, to name but a few. Their first spell in the top tier was short, between 1971 and 1974, as the club plunged back into the second division for more than a decade, as football was developing fast not only in the Aveiro district but mainly north of the River Douro.
By 1988, however, things started to change. Aveiro’s university became more popular during the decade as new educational centres developed outside of the Lisbon-Coimbra-Porto axis, and the city’s economy, fuelled mainly by the canned food industry, was benefiting from Portugal’s recent inclusion in the common market of the EEC.
By the 1987/88 campaign, Beira-Mar got promoted back to the first division with a side coached by the Belgian Jean Thissen, who had Victor Urbano as his assistant. They finished second in the central division, below Académico de Viseu and four points clear of Torreense and União de Leiria, after years of failure. On their first season back at the top, Beira-Mar finished a creditable 15th, a point clear of the relegation zone, in a season when five sides were relegated to restore an 18-team league.
In 1989/90, things improved drastically, particularly when Victor Urbano was promoted to first team coach, guiding the Alvinegros to a comfortable 11th place in the league table. The side added Egyptian international Abdel Al Ghany to their ranks and the former club legend António Sousa, who had just been let go by FC Porto. Alongside centre-backs Dinis and Petar Petrov, former Sporting international Mário Jorge, the veteran Paquito Saura and striker Penteado, it looked like a fine side, expected to drive through the 1990/91 season unharmed. That would also be the season when Beira-Mar decided to switch shirt sponsors.
Based near Aveiro, Levira took its name from one of the tributaries that flowed into the River Vouga, which feeds Aveiro lagoon before swimming into the Atlantic. It was a small, local company, and as with everything regarding Portuguese football at the time, stitched together the bond between the local club, the local fandom and the booming local commercial enterprises. There was still no room for globalisation in the Portuguese game.
The club had been previously sponsored by a butcher’s, Talhos Campos, and now embraced a more industrial blueprint. A locally based company New Sports provided the manufactured kits and shorts, with black gaining more relevance on the shirt than it used to for the 1990/91 season. Until then, only the collar was black as Beira-Mar shirts were almost exclusively yellow (see the Eusébio picture above) but the brand made a small adjustment by adding two thick diagonal black stripes of black from the shoulders to the armpit, to bring a sense of modernity at a time when the biggest names in the market, namely Adidas, Puma, Umbro and Hummel were starting to experiment with new designs and templates. Beira-Mar couldn’t afford a deal with any of those world-class brands, but they could feel like they were part of a new wave by embracing a more modern football shirt style.
Levira, the sponsor, was placed at the centre, in all-black as the collar and trims were also painted black, as were the shorts, while socks remained yellow and black as was historically traditional. The shirt’s polyester design also meant there were two shades of yellow stripes to lend it a sense of movement, and for some occasions the sponsor’s name was printed with a white background, instead of the customary black letters. The alternative kit remained all-white, as it had been the season before, but it was used only once, when the team travelled to Funchal to meet União da Madeira.
The season soon became the most memorable one in the club’s history, with the forward Dino brought from Nacional now added to the attacking line alongside Jorge Silvério, who became the side’s top scorer. Urbano often played Hélder in goal, with Dinis, Redondo, China and Oliveira at the back, Sousa and Abdel Ghany in creative roles, with José Ribeiro providing support and Silverio, Dino and Tozé Ribeiro giving offensive prowess. Despite starting the season with four consecutive draws, Beira-Mar soon found their form and ended the campaign sixth in the standings, their best result ever.
Only a defeat against Benfica on the last day of the season prevented them from finishing one place higher in the league table which would have meant qualification for the UEFA Cup. They would have played Zinedine Zidane’s Cannes at the Estádio Mário Duarte but instead the French team went to the Bessa to meet Salgueiros.
However, better than the sixth-place finish was Beira-Mar managing to surprise everyone by making it to the Portuguese Cup final for the first time in their history. They did so by beating Fafe, União da Madeira, Estrela da Amadora, Ovarense and Boavista in the semis before facing FC Porto in the Jamor final. It was the highlight of a memorable campaign, even if the side finished on the losing side after taking the Dragons to extra time, thus missing the possibility of enjoying European football for the second time in a fortnight.
For the 1991/92 campaign, New Sport decided to keep the same kit template as the club renewed sponsorship with Levira. The season wasn’t as brilliant as the one before, but Beira-Mar finished 8th, sustaining the good sensations from the previous campaign. For the 1991/92 season the sponsorship of Levira was enhanced with the company name appearing mainly with a white background to become more visible.
By 1992, the sustained success of the previous campaigns led the club to finally sign with a high-profile sports manufacturer. New Sport was gone and Hummel came into the picture and they would provide the club’s kits for the following three campaigns, before moving briefly to Olympic and then Umbro for the end of the decade until they moved to the smaller MPH who manufactured the famous 1998/99 kit that supporters still revere due to the Portuguese Cup win at the end of that season.
New Sport disappeared from the football market in the mid-1990s, and the club also replaced the popular Levira sponsorship with Vulcano. Beira-Mar were a regular top-tier side in the 1990s, making both the Mário Duarte ground and the Black and Yellow club shirts part of the popular culture. The city itself started to attract more attention up to the point that the “Portuguese Venice” tag began to be used more often, helping transform Aveiro into one of the most popular tourism destinations in the land over the following decade.
Beira-Mar’s future was darker than anyone could have imagined back then. The club has spent the past decade in the lower leagues after being relegated due to financial issues. They haven’t been able to step up since, performing nowadays in the local district league, a grim situation for a side that played two Cup finals, winning one of them. The Aveiro district is today represented at the highest level by the small town of Arouca, and in the second tier by the likes of Feirense and Oliveirense.
With their iconic stadium long gone, memories of those glorious afternoons still live in the memory of locals. Many expect that someday that iconic yellow and black shirt will once again find its way among the elite of Portuguese football as it did during those halcyon days in the early nineties.
By Miguel Lourenço Pereira, author of “Bring Me That Horizon – A Journey to the Soul of Portuguese Football”.
Portimonense host Farense tomorrow in a red-hot Algarve derby with both teams fighting to stay in Division Two. The two sides have seen happier days...
The Carnation Revolution was felt in every single aspect of Portuguese society. Not at the same time, not at the same pace, but quietly, Portugal started to feel like a different, more modern country.
Part of that change came hand in hand with a slow, incomplete, but essential decentralisation process that football represented perhaps better than any other popular activity. For decades, the main bulk of the football league clubs had come from the greater Lisbon area, including the Setúbal district, the economic pillar of the fascist regime. A scarce nationwide presence of other sides explained why the country was not comfortable with itself once it lost sight of the walls of the capital.
April 1974 changed all that. The economy in other regions boomed, released from the shackles of the corporativist economic model preferred by António Salazar and his successor Marcelo Caetano, and in turn helped regional football clubs make a name for themselves. It was a slow-paced change that spread across the land over the following decade. By the mid-1980s, the regions of Madeira, Trás-os-Montes, Minho and the inland districts of the Beiras had found their voice in the football league. One of the greatest symbols of this new era was the fact the Algarve derby was finally played among the big fish in Portuguese football’s top division.
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Portimonense and Farense have become the two big names of a region that always felt at odds with the rest of Portuguese society. For centuries, the Algarve was so isolated that it was easier for locals to reach Seville, far across the Spanish Andalusian border, than Lisbon. Dependent on fishing, the relationship with those who lived there – and they were not many – was closer to the northern Moroccan villages or the Spanish pueblos on the other side of the border. It was a social dynamic that changed the way they talked, the way they behaved and the way they managed to stay alive, fighting for crumbs.
Football clubs suffered as much as anyone else. Despite the early popularity of the game – in Spain, it had been established just across the border in Huelva, so from an early period football was played in the Algarve as well – no football club was ever able to thrive. Olhanense, the region’s third big club, even managed to claim the Campeonato de Portugal in the late 1920s, making them winners of a cup format competition that is viewed as the predecessor of the Primeira Liga or the Portuguese Cup, depending on who you are talking to. It was Algarve’s football finest hour, but not only was it forgotten by everyone else in the land, but also in the region itself, and soon enough Olhanense fell into almost oblivion.
Only Sporting Clube Farense, a club founded by a group of teenagers who so admired Sporting CP that they decided to go with their name and colours, only to mistake the green and white half of the shirt for black and white, as the published photos were not yet in colour in the 1920s. Portimonense Sport Club, who also decided to go with the black and white as their primary colours, presented some sense of the football potential of the region.
Their rivalry was deeply felt by the 1930s, and they were regular contestants of the Portuguese second and third divisions from the 1940s onwards. Backed by the canned fish industry developed in the area, Portimonense were almost promoted in 1949 to the first tier but the political influence of a cabinet minister of Salazar’s, Fernando Andrade Pires de Lima, who had a fancy for Académica, forced a tie at a neutral ground after the team from the Algarve came on top in the promotion play-off. The Coimbra club won out. It was the closest Portimonense ever came to playing in the first division during the fascist years.
Farense only got there in 1971, despite having tried for several seasons, also fuelled by the local economy focused on the canning industry. It was a short-lived experience, but it proved that the Algarve was starting to be heard, and it wasn’t only in footballing terms. The motorway connecting Lisbon to Portugal’s southern coast to provide access to the summer pleasures of the region was a reality by then, and soon enough, a tourism boom completely changed the lives of the Algarvians. It became the primary holiday destination for Lisbon’s upper classes, and after the April Revolution, it was also adopted by the emergent middle classes who were ready to make an almost fifteen-hour drive from north to south to enjoy its paradisiacal beaches.
By the 1980s, visitors from abroad, particularly from the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands, who had already travelled the length and breadth of the Spanish coastline, also found in the Algarve the perfect holiday destination. A poor region still, but one that had now found a new fountain of riches and eventually that money followed the sporting path. By the early 1980s, for the first time, the Algarve had two sides competing in the first division. It was during the 1983/84 campaign, and both duels ended in a draw. Neither team was relegated, so the Algarve readied itself for another season in the top flight and another derby that sparked the attention of the region’s football community. What few expected is that the game would mean so much come the end of the season.
On 23 December 1984, two days before Christmas, there was still some sun peeking out of the clouds that swept across Portimão, as buses from Faro started to arrive in town, bringing the Farense supporters for a heated duel. The two regional giants were preparing to face off once again, but few had expected, at the beginning of the campaign, that things would be going so well for both, particularly for Portimonense.
While Farense sat comfortably in mid-table, having accumulated 13 points in 13 matches played – five above the drop-zone where Rio Ave sat – Portimonense had found themselves as close to a title run as they ever had been. The side was fourth in the league table, with 18 points, just three fewer than reigning champions Benfica and five below Artur Jorge’s FC Porto, who sat at the top of the table. Moreover, the five-point gap to Braga, in sixth, meant Portimonense were at least well placed for a UEFA Cup slot in the following season, something few had ever expected to happen for a club from the Algarve.
Everything had to do with the coaching genius of Manuel José, one of Portugal’s most influential football managers and the greatest icon of football in the Algarve. Born in Vila Real de Santo António, right alongside the River Guadiana border with Spain, Manuel José enjoyed a playing career that took him to Benfica as a youth graduate and then across the full geography of Portuguese football in the seventies, playing for the likes of Farense, União de Tomar, Beira-Mar and Sporting Espinho. It was there, by the Atlantic, that his career as player-manager kick-started in 1978, and after a brief spell in Guimarães, where he succeeded José Maria Pedroto, José moved back to his favoured Algarve to take charge of Portimonense.
There, he assembled a memorable side that included mostly local players. Despite all the commodities and new highways, most players still preferred to be paid less and remain near Lisbon or Porto instead of travelling south to an almost isolated piece of land. José had in the likes of Alinho, Bernardino Pedroto, Teixeirinha, the former Porto veteran Simões, Abreu, Carvalho, Vítor Oliveira (future manager of many first division sides) the brothers João and Luis Reina and the young Rui Águas, son of the former Benfica legend José Águas, players who were talented enough to punch above their weight.
The star of the side was a Belgian, though, Serge Cadorin, a former Liege man who moved to Portugal in 1983, where he spent the rest of the decade, scoring almost fifty goals in a hundred matches played for Portimonense and Académica. Portimonense had only lost two matches, against Boavista and Benfica, and had held Sporting to a draw at home.
They were heavy favourites to win, but Farense also had some decent arguments to their name. Their season didn’t look as fantastic as their neighbours, but under Fernando Mendes, a veteran Sporting icon, with Manuel Cajuda serving has deputy, the Faro Lions could claim in their ranks players such as Teixeira, Hernani, Carraça, Amaral, Rui Lopes, Bukovac, and above all the Catalan Paco Fortes, a former Barcelona player who ended up in the Algarve in the later stages of his career and would become the club’s greatest football icon. It was expected to be a tight affair and ended up turning into a football classic of the era.
Portimonense entered the pitch sporting their best eleven in their usual kit, with Cardorin partnering his fellow Belgian Alain Thiriart, playing in front of a midfield four of Reina, Pedroto, Skoda and Carvalho. Mendes was in goal, and Teixeirinha, Simões, Balacó and Dinis completed the defensive line. Fernando Mendes didn’t have Fortes available due to injury, so he called up the veteran goalkeeper Amaral, alongside Miguel Quaresma, Quim, Leonardo, the Bulgarian international Bukovac, accompanied by Hernani, Carraça, Martins, Borges, Gil and Rui Lopes up front. They dressed in all white.
The stadium was packed as it always had been during the heated derbies played while both sides were in the second tier, and the home crowd began to celebrate early as Luis Reina, a local fan favourite, opened the score on the 9th minute with a beautiful strike. Portimonense were clearly motivated by the home support and their positive run of results, and they quickly pressed for a second. It came at the 26th minute. A neat combination between Reina and Cadorin played in the Belgian with the whole goal to aim at in front of a hapless Amaral.
While it looked like a one-sided affair, it was far from it. Farense began fighting back, showing pace and grit where they lacked talent, and they began to create chance after chance until Gil, their slim Brazilian forward, put the ball past Mendes to get one back just before the break. Game on!
In the second half, Farense had the better opportunities as they battled to grab a precious away draw. Manuel José’s boys, on the other hand, felt comfortable on the ball and controlling the rhythm of play, while occasionally causing some scares in the visitors’ defensive line. On the hour, both managers decided to make changes. Fernando Mendes switched Bukovac for Rogério to put an extra man in attack, while José answered by bringing on Julio for Thiriat to gain more presence in the middle of the park.
The match was tight, and when João Reina, the centre-back and Luis’ brother came on, it seemed that Portimonense were preparing to hold on for a final assault, but it was he who headed in a third and decisive goal from a set piece with ten minutes to play. By then, the home crowd had already started to believe the win was theirs, and their Christmas supper would have some extra cheer to it. Chants of Merry Christmas started to erupt from the stands as the players prepared for the final moments.
Farense still had a couple of chances to their name but were unable to make good on them and ended up accepting the defeat as a natural consequence of Portimonense’s brilliant first half of the season.
Manuel José was a happy coach at full time, saying: “We witnessed a great game of football, especially in the first half, which was helped by the springlike afternoon. The teams played with the ball on the ground, with constant switching of flanks and at a pace that the public are not very used too.
“The best tribute I pay to Farense is to say they were the opponents who gave us our toughest game, so far, here in Portimão.”
“I general, the victory is fair given what both teams did over the ninety minutes.”
A 4-1 away thrashing in Porto at Estádio das Antas brought Manuel José’s players back down to earth, but at the halfway point of the campaign, Portimonense still sat fifth, with the same number of points as Boavista. While many expected them to drop more points in the second half of the season, particularly after a surprising defeat against relegation battling Salgueiros, they remained highly competitive, losing against Sporting and Belenenses away but drawing at Estádio da Luz.
Come the final round, they were still fighting for fourth position in the league table, but an already championship-winning Porto side came to Portimão and won, guaranteeing Boavista would finish the season a step above the side from the Algarve. It was Portimonense’s only home defeat of the entire season, but as they celebrated, further down the coastline, tears were being shed at Faro.
Farense, who had seemed so comfortable for most of the campaign, got themselves into trouble after a poor series of results. A home draw against Portimonense in the penultimate match of the season meant they had to win on the last day away at Salgueiros’ mythical Vidal Pinheiro ground in what effectively was a final to avoid relegation. The Porto side had 21 points, one fewer than Farense, but a draw may not be enough if Rio Ave managed to win their game as well. It was a tense last day. António Carraça’s goal seemed to have guaranteed Farense another season at the top. Alas, a late comeback powered by the famed Alma Salgueirista resulted in a 3-1 defeat and meant Farense dropped below both Rio Ave and Salgueiros.
The result of that afternoon game just before Christmas in Portimão hurt them in the end more than they could have fathomed. A draw that day would have been enough to guarantee a place in the top flight, but a loss in an Algarve derby played in the first division for the first time also sealed their fate.
Portimonense managed to qualify for the following campaign’s UEFA Cup, but with Manuel José moving to coach Sporting, their destiny was soon marred, and they would become a second-tier side by the end of the decade, taking more than twenty years to rise up again.
Farense, on the other hand, ended the decade playing the Portuguese Cup final – the first and only time a club from the Algarve managed such a feat – and then turned into one of the most popular first division sides in the following decade. They would eventually follow in Portimonense’s footsteps by qualifying for European football under Paco Fortes, appointed club manager after his playing career ended.
Although two sides from the Algarve would meet at the top of the football pyramid in future years, the 1980s was the decade in which the region was finally fully accepted into the dynamics of Portuguese football.
As with Madeira, who by the end of the 1980s had three sides playing in the first division, the heartfelt story of GD Chaves from Trás-os-Montes, the tenure of Sporting Covilhã in the top flight and the popularity of sides from the centre region of Leiria, Santarém, Coimbra and Aveiro, that was the decade that Portuguese football truly became a national sport, paving the way for a new era away from the centralised constraints and shackles of the past.
By Miguel Lourenço Pereira, author of “Bring Me That Horizon – A Journey to the Soul of Portuguese Football”.
Should Benfica avoid defeat on Saturday night at Estoril, it will be the second time the Eagles have achieved a bitter-sweet feat. Only once before has a football team in Portugal finished the league undefeated and yet failed to claim the title. Precisely Benfica.
It happened in 1977/78 in what was a turning point in the history of the Portuguese league. On the one hand, FC Porto claimed their first title in nineteen years. Few imagined at the time, but it was a launchpad for domination by the northerners over the following decades.
On the other hand, Benfica remained a formidable force and managed to finish the campaign undefeated, and yet it wasn’t enough to claim what would have then been a club record fourth title in a row.
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The Eagles would have to wait until 2017 to equal Sporting’s Tetra, but they weren’t the only football club to suffer the pain of finishing runners-up despite going all year undefeated in European football. In 1951, Spartak Sofia became the first side in any European league to finish the campaign undefeated and not be crowned champions. The Bulgarian side drew eight times and ended up a point behind CSKA Sofia, who had lost a single match all season. A similar fate happened to Benfica twenty-five years later.
At the start of the 1977/78 campaign, John Mortimore’s men were clearly considered as strong favourites to win the league. The last time they had not finished top of the table was in the 1973/74 campaign, lost to Sporting. Since then, even with Eusébio now gone, the Eagles remained the undisputed big dogs of Portuguese football. It was a side evolving from the dominating machine of the 1960s but still harnessing the club’s core identity to the bone. Youth academy graduates and local players, particularly from the famous South Bank towns, made up the bulk of the team in an all-Portuguese side, as foreigners would only be allowed to play for Benfica in the following decade.
English coach John Mortimore had at his disposal Portugal’s greatest goalkeeper, Manuel Bento, and a defensive quartet that included Minervino Pietra, Eurico Gomes, António Bastos Lopes and the star signing of the summer, the returning club captain Humberto Coelho, who had enjoyed a brief spell at Paris Saint-Germain. The long-serving midfielder Toni was also back from his Las Vegas experience, and was joined in midfield by the likes of Shéu Han, José Luis and the teenage wing genius Fernando Chalana. Nené, Celso and the maverick Vitor Baptista were the main striking threats of a side that no longer had Artur Jorge, Manuel Jordão or Eusébio but was still a formidable attacking force.
Few imagined there would be a big threat in their quest for a record fourth consecutive title, something that only Sporting had managed to do once before in the Cinco Violinos golden age. It was the biggest goal of the season, alongside a return to the heights of European football. Benfica were the best team in Europe in the 1960s, reaching the European Cup final 5 times and lifting the trophy twice, but their glorious past was still proving a weight on their shoulders as they struggled to return to former glories in the following decade.
From the start it appeared that Mortimore’s and Benfica’s main domestic rivals would by Sporting. José Maria Pedroto’s Boavista had put up a strong fight for the league trophy in recent campaigns, but the manager had now moved to Porto, who had been underwhelming for a decade, and few expected Pedroto to have an immediate impact despite great results both at Boavista and Vitória FC.
The Lisbon derby kicked off the campaign, and a draw, with two early goals from Chalana and Franguito, set the tone for the season. Three consecutive wins followed – against Belenenses, Vitória SC and Varzim – and then a second draw, away at Boavista, which allowed FC Porto to climb into first place after an impressive start of the season. Benfica then reeled off four consecutive wins versus Sporting Espinho, Portimonense, Marítimo and Sporting Covilhã, which aided by Porto’s only defeat of the season, away at Estoril, allowed the Eagles to climb back to top spot by late November.
A surprise draw with Braga followed by wins against Setúbal and Estoril set up what already looked like a key contest in the title run, as Benfica hosted FC Porto in a packed Estádio da Luz stadium on a cold January afternoon. A goalless draw left everything as it was, but when Benfica slipped up at Restelo, Porto finally took a lead at the top of the standings, never to let go of it.
It became a marathon run right until the end of the season, with both sides dropping points almost at the same time, but never a single defeat that would allow the league standings to take a turn. Benfica were held by Varzim, Portimonense and Braga, in what was already a surprising eight draws in total, a number perhaps a consequence of a lack of a poacher who could take advantage of their offensive quality.
Porto held firm during that run, also benefiting from the fact that Benfica had invested so much effort in the European Cup, where they beat Torpedo Moscow and Boldklubben 1903 before falling at the hands of the holders Liverpool, and a Portuguese Cup run, where they were eventually beaten by Sporting in the last eight. Come May though, and Benfica would still be unbeaten in the league, although they were not in top spot. The sides were still separated by a single point when the Eagles visited Porto in what became one of the most iconic football matches of the decade.
An unfortunate own goal by Carlos Simões gave Benfica the early lead they were praying for. In the second half, despite Porto’s best efforts, it was Humberto Coelho who could have netted a second visitors, goalkeeper João Fonseca making a fantastic save to keep the game alive for the hosts. Porto threw everything at António Fidalgo’s goal, who replaced the injured Bento, and Ademir managed to grab an equaliser, netting on the rebound after a free-kick had been repelled, with only seven minutes to play. That was how it finished. The 1-1 draw made it nine times Benfica had shared the points with their opponents in the season.
With two games to go and a one-point advantage in the standings, it seemed it was Porto’s title to lose. They drew in the following match, though, with the ghost of past blunders creeping in, setting up a title decider on the last day of the campaign. June 11th saw the northern side beat Sporting Braga at home while Benfica travelled to the Braga district to play Riopele, hoping for a miracle they never got, despite scoring four goals to complete a memorable campaign.
Benfica’s nine draws were two more than Porto. While Pedroto’s men had one defeat to their name, Benfica had none. Yet, they both finished the season equal on points with the Dragons, the northerns winning the league because they had a better goal difference. Porto had scored 81 goals and conceded 21 while Benfica had just let in 11 goals against but were uncapable of scoring more than 56, a worst offensive return than third-placed Sporting, who finished nine points behind in the league table. The absence of Eusébio or one of the killer strikers they had enjoyed over the past seasons meant the historic Tetra eluded them once again. It was the fifth time Benfica had won three league titles in a row, only to miss a fourth by the narrowest of margins.
Funnily enough, a season later, in Italy, Perugia suffered a similar fate, as they fought against AC Milan for the Scudetto. The side led by the great Paolo Rossi went 30 matches undefeated in Serie A but conceded a staggering 19 draws to finish three points adrift of the Rossoneri, who had lost three times but still managed to win the league. Less than a decade later, in Turkey, Galatasaray also missed out on the league title because of a worse goal difference than Besiktas, despite failing to lose a single match, while their rivals had two defeats to their name. Sixteen draws did it for the Istanbul-based juggernaut.
Of the three, Benfica had the better season and arguably the better side, but suffered the same fate. The Lisbon giants would have to wait for 1981 to celebrate the league title again, after Porto claimed back-to-back trophies, and Sporting came on top in the 1979/80 season.
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Only on three other occasions has a Portuguese side finished the season undefeated, but each time, unsurprisingly, they were crowned league champions. FC Porto under André Villas-Boas did it in 2011, and two years later so did Vitor Pereira’s Dragons. Benfica had been the first team to do it, in 1972/73, clinching the trophy eighteen points clear from Belenenses after winning 28 and drawing two of their 30 games.
Few people recognise the greatness of that Benfica side of 1977/78. At the time it became only the second team to finish the league undefeated. Not only did it prove that Benfica could still be a dominant force in the land, but the campaign also signalled there was a new rival to reckon with. For the following decade, Porto and Benfica traded titles, before the Blue and Whites began a winning streak that would edge them ever closer to the total number the championship triumphs held by their Lisbon rivals.
By Miguel Lourenço Pereira, author of “Bring Me That Horizon – A Journey to the Soul of Portuguese Football”.
It was once Portugal’s greatest and most modern football ground. The best grass pitch in the land, a statement of intent for a footballing nation that was starting to realise how important the game was becoming.
The Salésias was more than just a football temple. It was a way into the future that also ushered in Os Belenenses greatest era, a time when the Belém Blue and Whites were considered on a par with the Big Three of Benfica, Sporting and Porto that we know today.
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The views from the Restelo stadium are some of the most stunning of any football ground in the world. From the stands, you can contemplate the immensity of the Tagus River, the redness of the towering 25 April bridge and the Cristo Rei statue on the south bank, greeting everyone who passes by. The Belém Tower and the Jerónimos nearby remind us how, once, Lisbon was one of the most important capital cities in the world.
The stadium is beautiful from the inside and the outside, and it is also a landmark of football in the capital, as it was in those grounds where not only Belenenses started to kick a ball, but also the likes of Casa Pia and SL Benfica as well. Why then, looking back, do many Belenenses supporters look at the now-gone Salésias stadium with such fond memories? The answer is, because, regardless of the beauty of the Restelo, it was never as modern and as futuristic as the Salésias had once been, and it also never hosted as much on-pitch success as the club’s previous ground.
The memory of the Salésias is not lost. Nowadays, there’s a training ground where the club’s academy players are coached, the blue and white kits returning to the place where they first became nationwide celebrities. It is as if the aura of the old could pass on to the generations of today and tomorrow. Ten years have gone by since the Salésias was reinaugurated and Belenenses have come a long way since.
Winning the devastating conflict with the former owners of the SAD, the Codecity company, which kept on playing in the top tier as BSAD for a few seasons, was an important step. Belenenses also managed to briefly return to the second tier and professional football after having been reestablished, starting from scratch, although they are now in Liga 3 again, with the goal of getting back as soon as possible into the elite.
Remembering the importance of the Salésias in the club’s identity is a major step in reassessing what Belenenses are all about. After all, this was the team that, for many, remains as Portugal’s fourth biggest club. The first – and for half a century the only one – ever to win the league bar the likes of Porto, Benfica and Sporting. A multiple Portuguese Cup winner and a decisive institution in the first decades of the game in Portugal. Most of that glorious time was spent at the Salésias, and that also helps to explain the mythical status of the ground.
The Campo José Manuel Soares – later named after the deceased footballer Pepe, a club icon – was most commonly known as Campo das Salésias or Estádio das Salésias, because of the place name where it was originally built. It was near Rua Alexandre Santos, in the Ajuda neighbourhood of western Lisbon, that the ground turned into one of the most modern football stadiums in the Iberian Peninsula at the time, ranking alongside Athletic Club’s San Mamés in Bilbao, Barcelona’s Les Corts, Real Madrid’s Chamartín and Atlético Madrid’s Metropolitano. It was 1928 when the facilities were first inaugurated, two years after a military coup ended what had been sixteen disastrous years for the Republican movement.
The Ajuda area was bursting with life and had birthed many football clubs and footballers over the previous decades. Closer to the city centre than the Restelo area where the club would eventually move, the Salésias meant Belenenses were now considered part of the big guys. The club had only come to be nine years earlier when some footballers got fed up of playing for clubs from the other parts of the city. Sport Lisboa moved to Benfica to become Sport Lisboa e Benfica, and Sporting were quietly settled in the Campo Grande area, so those residing in and around the Ajuda borough decided it was time for them to have a club of their own.
The main man behind the idea was Portugal’s first great superstar, Artur José Pereira, a brilliantly talented footballer who had been born in the neighbourhood and later became famed as a Benfica player. He, alongside his brother and several players from Benfica and Sporting, decided to break away from their former clubs and begin competing with the Cross of Christ as their symbol, representing the influential role that the Restelo and Ajuda areas had played in the inception of the Portuguese colonial empire.
They started to play in the Campo de Pau de Fio and quickly enrolled in the Lisbon Regional championship, one they soon began to win as well, the first trophy coming in 1926, only seven years after the club had been founded. With Augusto Silva and the young Pepe as rising stars, Belenenses, alongside new neighbours Casa Pia, menaced the status quo of Benfica and Sporting during those years. They soon outgrew the Campo de Pau de Fio and were looking for a new home when the Salésias grounds became available.
Works began as early as 1926, and the stadium was finally inaugurated on 29 January 1928. It included a tarmac track for the staging of different sports. Belenenses, much like all other Portuguese clubs of the day, was unashamedly a multi-sports club, and the new facility could host up to 20,000 people, making it the biggest in the country. It was also the first to sport a covered stand for the convenience of the club members. Well rooted within the local architecture, it was a stadium that connected well with the club’s spirit of representing the western Lisbon bohemian and ambitious identity.
The whole ground was so astoundingly modern that it soon became the unofficial home of the Portuguese national side, and would remain so whenever they played in Lisbon up until the opening of the Jamor National Stadium in 1944. It was at Salésias that the local players Artur Quaresma, Simões and Amaro refused to perform the fascist salute when the Francoist Spanish side came to town, after a previous friendly had been played in Vigo. For that, the players were arrested and only released because some high-profile members of the military and Salazar’s cabinet were also Belenenses supporters.
It was a trend for the following decades as the club that had begun as a symbol of the local community quickly evolved into one closer to the fascist regime, more than their founders would have probably wanted. By then, the Salésias also hosted many Cup finals, and they watched how Belenenses quickly rose to national prominence, even if they had to endure the tragic loss of Pepe, poisoned with arsenic by his own mother’s ill-judgement, at a tender age in 1931.
In the 1930s, Belenenses reinforced their status as a national powerhouse, inspiring clubs in different regions of the country to take shape. In 1937 the Salésias was upgraded to become the first ground in Portugal with a grass pitch rather than a dirt pitch. Not only that, but it was the first to sport bathrooms – for men and women alike – and both dressing rooms enjoyed hot water, a commodity few grounds enjoyed back then. Coached by Cândido de Oliveira, the side became regular title contenders, winning the Campeonato de Portugal in 1931. When the league was eventually formed, first as a trial in 1934, and then officially in 1939, Belenenses were almost always in the top four.
Championship triumph
Their sole win came in 1946, after they had won the Cup in 1942, in their third consecutive final, and been runners-up in the two previous seasons. It was the club’s golden hour, and the matches played at the Salésias were key to the side’s success in their title-winning season, as they remained undefeated at home and only failed to win one of their matches there. In fact, Belenenses’ prestige was such that they were invited by Santiago Bernabéu to play Real Madrid in the inauguration of the new Chamartín the following year.
Come the following decade, the signings of Matateu and his younger brother Vicente helped the club keep a high-profile. For a while Belenenses seemed close to winning a second league title, but it never materialised.
But why did Belenenses have to move out of such a brilliant ground where they had enjoyed so much success? Like Benfica, who had been expelled from Lumiar years before, Belenenses got evicted by the city hall, which wanted to build a highway on the land where the stadium was located. In return, contrary to what happened with the Eagles, the local council offered a new patch of land in Restelo, with a view over the river and the Jerónimos monastery. Construction began in 1954, and in the same campaign, Belenenses could have won the league on the final day, only to be beaten by Sporting, a defeat that granted Benfica the title win.
The following season was the last one for Salésias with the new Estádio do Restelo inaugurated in September 1956, with the main figures of the fascist regime in attendance for the opening ceremony, against Sporting. Two days later, the new ground, roofed practically in its entirety, also inaugurated its floodlights, which was a novelty in Portugal, in a match against Stade Reims, who had just lost the European Cup final against Real Madrid. Belenenses won both matches with Matateu on the scoresheet.
From then on, the club remained closely associated with a ground that remains, to this day, their home and that hosted not only memorable football matches but also iconic music concerts benefiting of its remarkable location in Lisbon’s grandiose landscape.
The Salésias was abandoned, but the highway was never built. In fact, nothing was. After years of indecision about what was going to happen with those now neglected lands, it became a forgotten place, for decades left to rot. The only indication of its former glory was a memorial plaque that remembered it had been Portugal’s first grass pitch, standing next to what had become a disused overgrown field with two goals on it. The Salésias remained an estranged place, a memory of a golden age that was seemingly not coming back.
By the 1960s, Belenenses had started to become a shadow of who they once were, and after the Carnation Revolution, things got worse. They were relegated for the first time in their history, managed to return to the top and win the 1989 Portuguese Cup, but then plunged again into the lower tiers, becoming a yo-yo club ever since. When the Codecity company bought the majority shareholding of the club to run the football division, a scion became inevitable. Belenenses, the football club, started from the bottom of the pyramid, while BSAD, the company who owned the competitive licence, played in the first division until the club were relegated and then disbanded.
The whole drama surrounding the possibility of one of Portugal’s biggest sporting institutions facing the menace of disappearing altogether brought back a sense of nostalgia, and with it the Salésias memory took shape once again. The club managed to persuade the city hall to donate to the club the ground where the stadium once was, and in 2016, construction works began so that the youth teams could enjoy a place to train that was deeply rooted in the club’s legacy.
Belenenses will probably never play again at the Salésias, but that doesn’t mean the ground was forgotten, and now it is part of a club that is looking for a way out from the shadows to return to their former self. Indeed in bygone times the crowd popularised the expression “15 minutes Belenenses style” in an era when the Cruz de Cristo club were one of most formidable sides in the Iberian Peninsula.
By Miguel Lourenço Pereira, author of “Bring Me That Horizon – A Journey to the Soul of Portuguese Football”.
