Libertad Asunción

A ship carrying liberal revolutionaries sailed into Asunción in 1904 to help bring down the ruling Colorado government, and the following year a group of young men led by Juan Manuel Sosa Escalada named their new club after it. That was on 30 July 1905.

The club calls itself Paraguay's third force, behind Olimpia and Cerro Porteño: the domestic championship trophy has returned to Asunción 26 times, in bursts separated by decades — one more in 1976, then a run that took off in 2002 and has barely paused since, with the most recent in 2025.

The closest Libertad has come to a continental trophy is a pair of Copa Libertadores semi-finals, in 1977 and 2006, and three Copa Sudamericana semi-finals since. In 1998 the club dropped into the second division, a relegation still remembered in Paraguayan football as a genuine shock given the size of the institution it hit.

Óscar Cardozo scored 110 goals in 288 appearances before Benfica and Olympiacos came calling, and remains the club's all-time top scorer. Roque Santa Cruz, the country's best-known forward of his generation, closed out his playing career at Libertad in 2025.

Home games are played at the Estadio Tigo La Huerta, opened in 2005 in the Tuyucuá neighbourhood and named for years after Nicolás Léoz, a former club president who went on to lead CONMEBOL; it now holds 15,000 following renovation work in the 2020s. The fixture against Olimpia, the Clásico Blanco y Negro, remains the one that matters most, ahead of meetings with Cerro Porteño and Guaraní. Nelson Valdez, who played at two World Cups for Paraguay, took over as coach in 2026, arriving at a club already carrying the league title into the new season.