Maricá U20

Maricá's Under-20 side takes the field in the Campeonato Carioca U20 and the Copa Rio U20, and its progress gets read against a first team that has swung hard the past two seasons — up into Rio de Janeiro's top flight in 2025, then back down after a 10th-place finish sent the senior side to the Série A2 for 2026.

The pathway exists because the club itself is barely older than the players coming through it. Maricá Futebol Clube took its current name and license in 2018, when football manager Douglas Almeida struck a partnership with a club then based in Magé and moved its headquarters into a city that had gone without a professional side since 2005. The paperwork dates the club to March 2017; the shirt, red and white, has carried the project since.

Home matches are played at the Estádio Municipal João Saldanha, in the Cordeirinho district, opened in May 2023 with room for around 2,000 people — a step up from the borrowed Estádio Alziro in Itaboraí, where the club played before it had a ground of its own. A far bigger arena, for 30,000, is planned on the same site by 2028.

None of that history belongs to the academy yet. The club is too young to have produced a name of its own, and the closest the first team has come to a prolific scorer is imported: Pablo Thomaz, who passed through the academies of Coritiba and Santos before joining Maricá and scoring 11 goals in the 2025 promotion campaign. Building an equivalent from within is what the Under-20 side is there to do.