Maria da Fonte

The manager who took Sport Clube Maria da Fonte up in 2018 had a squad drawn from the parish of Nossa Senhora do Amparo and little else, and he still won it. The Pró-Nacional title of the AF Braga that season sent the club into the Campeonato de Portugal for the first time since it had been founded in 1925 — a promotion the Póvoa de Lanhoso Municipal Council thought significant enough to mark with its own ceremony, which says something about how rarely this town gets to celebrate a football club.

Póvoa de Lanhoso is not a football town in any conventional sense, and Maria da Fonte's ground carries that into its name: Estádio dos Moinhos Novos, the new mills, gave the club its nickname, Os Moinhos, and its supporters go by Marifontistas. There is no derby to speak of here, no fixture the town builds its year around — Bragança, Montalegre, Fafe come and go as regional opponents rather than rivals.

What the club does have, once a season allows, is the Taça de Portugal, where lower-division sides get a shot at the sides they will never otherwise meet. In the 2024–25 competition that meant a third-round tie against FC Arouca, a Primeira Liga club, at a ground built to hold 1,500.