Guarani de Palhoça

Palhoça sits just south of Florianópolis, and for most of the past century its football has run through one club rather than several. Guarani took its name from the indigenous people of the region and its supporters still go by "Bugrinos" — a small town's team, built around a single ground rather than a rotating cast of rivals for local attention.

The club traces back to February 1928, and it turned professional only in 2000, under president Amaro José da Silva Júnior, decades after most of its Santa Catarina neighbours had done so. Since then it has spent much of its life shuttling between state divisions rather than settling into one. It reached the top flight briefly, finishing fourth in the Série A in 2004, and has otherwise made its name lower down: two Série B titles, in 2003 and 2012, and a Série C crown this year, in 2025, won back a season after dropping into that division. Seven Palhoça city championships, spread between 1978 and 1999, mark the years when the club's ambitions stayed closer to home.

Estádio Renato Silveira, where Guarani has played since 1972, carries the name of a club athlete and president whose father, then state governor, helped get it built. Games against Brusque, the "Clássico do Médio Vale," are the closest thing the club has to a fixture that draws outside interest.

What Guarani has done more consistently than win things is produce players who leave. José Aldo came through the youth academy before signing with Portugal's Portimonense, and the club is still spoken of locally as a "formador" — a place where talent is found young and sold on, more than one built to keep it.