Joventut Badalona

La Penya still carries a distinction no club in Spanish basketball can match except Real Madrid: since joining the top flight, Joventut Badalona has never once dropped out of Liga ACB. That record sits underneath a club that spent the 2017–18 season fighting off dissolution before its shareholders stepped in to keep it alive, a reminder that staying up has not always meant staying comfortable.

The club began life in 1930 as a supporters' group, Penya Spirit of Badalona, and the nickname stuck through name changes forced on it by politics in 1939 and a return, in 1978, to the identity it uses now. Green and black, adopted in 1940 once basketball became the main sport, have covered the club ever since.

Its best-remembered season came in 1993–94, when Joventut beat Panathinaikos in Tel Aviv to win the European Cup, a title the club has not repeated at that level since. Domestically it has taken the Copa del Rey eight times, most recently in 2008, the same year it added the EuroCup.

What sets La Penya apart is what it produces rather than only what it wins. Its academy sent Ricky Rubio and Rudy Fernández into the NBA and the Spanish national team, and the club has retired the numbers of Jordi Villacampa, Rafael Jofresa and Josep Maria Margall, players who came through that same pipeline. Matches against FC Barcelona are still called the Catalan derby, sharpened by the fact both clubs draw on the same city's basketball culture.

Four Liga ACB titles, the last coming in 1992, mark a domestic peak the club has not reached again in over three decades, even as it has kept its place among Spain's elite without interruption.