Esporte Limoeiro

Alfredinho left Limoeiro do Norte for Santos in the 1950s and played alongside Pelé there. The line runs forward, too: decades later Fabricio Ceará came through the same shirt on his way to Fortaleza and a career in Portugal.

Esporte Clube Limoeiro went silent between 1960 and 1984, after the Orós Dam burst and flooded the Jaguaribe Valley. Football returned at amateur level in 1985, then professionally in 1994, the year the club won the Campeonato Cearense Second Division at the first attempt. Four years later came the club's high point: seventh place overall in the Campeonato Brasileiro Série C, the best finish by any team from Ceará that season, with a run to the round of 16 before Anapolina ended it.

Money did the rest of the damage. Professional football stopped again in 2000. Esporte Clube Limoeiro itself did not return until 2016, and only after paying a fee of R$70,000 to the Ceará Football Federation to restore its status. That year it finished runner-up in the Série C third division and earned promotion.

Locally the club is known as the Steel Horse, playing in white and blue at the 3,000-capacity Estádio Bandeirão. Long before any of that, in the 1940s, the club had already found its first identity in the Campeonato Limoeirense.