Athletic Club

Estádio Joaquim Portugal seats a modest crowd by Série B standards — the ground has been under partial reconstruction, and once the work is finished the plan is to bring capacity up to 8,000. Athletic Club plays there because São João del-Rei, in Minas Gerais, is where the club has always played; there was never a reason to look elsewhere.

The city gave the club its shirt, and the shirt gave it its identity: black and white, worn since 1909, and the crest still carries the nickname Esquadrão de Aço — the Steel Squadron. For decades that identity had nowhere bigger to go than the town itself. Athletic won the São João del-Rei city championship 26 times, the last of them in 2009, a run long enough that for much of the twentieth century the club's whole footballing world was local.

That changed only recently. In 2024, Athletic finished as runner-up in Série C, a result that sent the club into Série B for the first time. It came off the back of a run of regional titles that had already started to stack up — the Campeonato Mineiro do Interior in 2022 and 2023, the Recopa Mineira in 2022, the Troféu Inconfidência in both 2024 and 2025 — the kind of sustained form that, in the Minas Gerais interior, tends to be the surest sign a club is about to move up a level.

Athletic now sits in Série B, still carrying the weight of a promotion campaign that landed only two years ago, with a rebuilt stadium behind it and a first real taste of national competition ahead.