João Pedro Palma Santos

João Pedro Palma Santos started in the biggest of them: Benfica took him in as a boy before Belenenses picked him up in 2011 and carried him all the way through to a first-team debut in 2018. It is the kind of route hundreds of Portuguese youngsters begin and few finish, and Santos made it as far as a senior appearance for the club that raised him.

What followed was less straightforward. A free transfer took him to Vitória Guimarães's B side in 2020, a step down in profile but a chance to keep playing regular football away from Lisbon. From there the path ran through AD Fafe and FC Felgueiras 1932, spells that kept him in Portugal's lower professional tiers rather than the limelight of the Primeira Liga. It is a career built more on persistence than on breakthrough moments.

The clearest picture of his current form comes from the most recent season on record, in which he scored eight goals in 23 appearances — a return that marks him out as a genuine goal threat at that level rather than a squad option. At 27, wearing the number 17 shirt for Lusitânia Lourosa, he remains a forward whose value is measured less in reputation than in the numbers he keeps putting up, season after season, club after club, in the parts of Portuguese football that rarely make headlines.