GIL Vicente

Barcelos does not talk about football the way a bigger city does. Gil Vicente formed on 3 May 1924, when a group of friends began meeting outside the city theatre named after the playwright Gil Vicente, and took the theatre's name for a club then called Gil Vicente Football Barcelense. It joined the Braga football association in 1931, years before it had a ground to call its own — that came in 1933, at a stadium later renamed Adelino Ribeiro Novo.

The club has spent most of its life moving between Portugal's top two divisions rather than settling in either. It reached the Primeira Liga for the first time in 1990, dropped back in 1997, returned in 1999, and was relegated again in 2006 over the so-called Mateus case, when the club fielded a player who was not properly registered. Promotion followed again in 2011, relegation in 2015, and a way back up in 2019 through an administrative decision rather than results on the pitch. Gil Vicente has twice won the Segunda Liga, in 1998–99 and 2010–11, each time as the route back to the top flight it had just lost.

Its best league finish, fifth place, came twice — in 1999/00 and again in 2021/22, a season that also sent the club into European competition, the UEFA Europa Conference League, for the first time in its history. The nearest it has come to a major trophy was in the 2011–12 Taça da Liga final, lost 2–1 to Benfica.

Since 2004 the club has played at the Estádio Cidade de Barcelos, a 12,046-capacity ground that replaced the old ground where it built its early identity. Supporters know the team by two nicknames, Gilistas and Galos — the Roosters.