Operário-PR

The ground on the edge of Ponta Grossa carries a second name that stuck harder than the official one: it holds 10,632, and it has been the club's address through decades in which almost everything else about the team changed.

Ponta Grossa was a junction town. Only one club in Paraná is older.

For most of the second half of the last century, that history sat unused. The state title of 1961 is the one the club counts as its own; a long stretch followed in which Operário were not a competitive presence in Paraná at all, and the route back ran through the state's second division, won in 2017.

2018 was the year the climb turned into something national. Operário took the Série C title and, with it, promotion out of the third tier — the first time the club had reached that level in the modern era. The 2015 Campeonato Paranaense, won three years earlier, had been the signal that the revival was real; the Série C followed it.

The most recent state championship came in 2025, the club's second since the rebuild and the first evidence in a decade that the 2015 side was not a one-off. Ponta Grossa's team now defends that title while holding its place among the clubs that expect to be in Paraná's final rounds every year — a demand the Fantasma had not made of them for a very long time.