Deportivo Madryn

In May 1965, Deportivo Madryn walked out at the Bombonera to play a club tournament for Argentina's champions of champions. A team from a Patagonian port town, founded four decades earlier, standing on the same turf as Boca Juniors — nobody in Puerto Madryn had seen anything like it before, and it would be years before they did again.

The club traces back to 1916, when Madryn Football Club first took the field. On 7 May 1924 it was reorganised as Club Atlético Madryn, later becoming Club Social y Deportivo Madryn. The colours, yellow and black, were not chosen for their looks: they came from the warning signs along the railway lines that had shaped the town's early years, and the nickname that followed, Aurinegro, has stuck ever since.

For most of the twentieth century, the club's silverware stayed close to home — provincial titles in Chubut, a run of championships in the Liga del Valle through the 1930s, and a stretch between 1959 and 1965 when it won ten of them in seven seasons. National recognition came later and slower. Promotion through Torneo Argentino B arrived in 2003, then again in 2013/14, when Madryn thrashed Estudiantes de Río Cuarto 4-0 in the final to move up to Torneo Argentino A.

The bigger jump came in 2021. Madryn won Primera Nacional, beating Racing de Córdoba in the final at Estadio Julio Humberto Grondona, and with it reached the Argentine top flight for the first time in its history — a moment the club had been building towards, in fits and starts, since that afternoon at the Bombonera. Home games are now played at Estadio Abel Sastre, opened in 2006 on the site of the old Coliseo del Golfo and holding 25,000.

Rivalries in Chubut football run through the same handful of towns Madryn has measured itself against for decades, none sharper than the meetings with Guillermo Brown, the other club from Puerto Madryn's own coast.