Cobresal

El Salvador is a mining town in the Atacama desert, and the football club that carries the same name grew out of that workforce. The miners gave the team its identity: white and orange kit, the nickname Mineros, and a stadium raised almost within sight of the pit.

Cobresal was founded on 5 May 1979. The following year the mining company built Estadio El Cobre for the new club, and it still plays there, holding 11,240 according to the Chilean federation's own figures. For a town without much else to draw a crowd, the ground has stayed close to the industry that pays for it.

Twice in the 1980s and 90s the club had to win its way back to the top flight, taking the Primera B title in 1983 and again in 1998. Between those two promotions came its best season by some distance: the 1987 Copa Chile, still the only major cup the club has lifted. The bigger prize came later. In 2015 Cobresal won the Clausura, a single Primera División championship that remains the high point of everything the town has put into the sport.

Its rival sits 600 kilometres north in Calama: Cobreloa, another club born of a copper mine, and the fixture between them is known as the Clásico del Cobre — two mining communities measuring themselves against each other rather than against the capital.

Beyond that one Clausura crown, the trophy cabinet stays thin. A club this tied to a single industry has never turned one title into a period of sustained dominance, and it has spent as much of its history fighting to stay in the top division as competing at the front of it.