Universitario Beni

Universitario del Beni has never had more than a regional following, but for three years running in the 2000s it was the team no one in the department could get past. The Beni departmental title fell to Trinidad in 2005, again in 2007 and once more in 2009, a run that gave the club, playing red, blue and white out of the Estadio Gran Mamoré, its clearest claim to standing above Primero de Mayo, the other Trinidad side it meets in the Clásico del Beni.

A single season in the Primera División came in 1993. Universitario finished fifth in its group, then found itself level on points with Chaco Petrolero in the relegation quadrangle; only the section winner stayed up, and Universitario went back down after that one campaign. A better run came later in the Copa Simón Bolívar, where the club reached the final in 2016 and lost to Petrolero de Yacuiba, having also taken part in the competition's very first edition back in 1976 — the same year the Chilean international Nibaldo Alegre turned out for the club.

In 2020 the club lost two of its own to COVID-19: the youth player Frans Román Guzmán and his father, Belizario Román, who had served as club president and as treasurer of the Beni football association. The deaths were reported well beyond Trinidad, in a year when Universitario, like most of Bolivian football below the top flight, had otherwise gone quiet.

It had started, in 1968, as something built rather than simply formed: teachers and students at the Universidad Autónoma del Beni José Ballivián put the club together as the university's own team, a role it has kept ever since.