José Bonifácio

Twice this club has had to shut its doors and twice it has found a way back onto the pitch. In 1999 José Bonifácio Esporte Clube licensed itself out of competition altogether, returned in 2006, and by 2019 was suspended again over unpaid fees — a suspension that never touched the youth and amateur sides, which kept training and playing under the same badge while the professional team sat idle.

The club came together on 1 February 1961, when AE José Bonifácio merged with América FC, taking the name of the city itself, in the countryside of São Paulo state. It stayed amateur for over a decade before turning professional in 1972, and that first professional season produced its best result: the Campeonato Paulista Série A3, the state championship's third tier, won at the first attempt and worth promotion out of it. Nineteen years later, in 1991, the Segunda Divisão followed, a second title with no third to match it since.

Locally the team is Tricolor do Vale, the tricolour of the valley, for the red, white and black it wears, and also Serpente do Vale — the serpent of the valley. Matches are played at the Estádio Municipal Antônio Pereira Braga, known to everyone simply as Pereirão, holding a little over 4,600 for a club whose rivalries stay close to home, drawn from the same stretch of countryside towns that fill out the lower divisions of the São Paulo state championship each year — fixtures that matter more locally than any table ever shows.