Patriotas Boyacá

A goalkeeper is not usually the man who sends a club into the top flight, but in 2011 that is exactly what happened in Tunja. Patriotas Boyacá had finished the Primera B season in second place, one spot short of automatic promotion, and had to beat América de Cali in a play-off to go up. The match went to penalties, and it was Carlos Chávez Ospina, the Patriotas goalkeeper, who stepped up and scored the decisive kick that put the club in Colombia's first division.

The club itself was younger than that story by only eight years. It was founded on 18 February 2003 at the initiative of the departmental governor Miguel Ángel Bermúdez and Jorge Armando García, and its name was put to a public vote, chosen to honour the patriots who fought at the Battle of Boyacá Bridge in 1819. The nickname that stuck, Lancero, points the same way. Red is the shirt's base colour, with green and white added from the departmental flag.

Patriotas have had two long spells in the Primera A, from 2012 to 2016 and again from 2017 to 2022, dropping down each time on results rather than off the pitch, and played in the Copa Sudamericana in 2017. The 2022 relegation was followed the very next year by a Primera B title, won outright this time rather than through a play-off, and a return to the top division they have held onto since. Home matches are played at the Estadio La Independencia in Tunja, which holds up to 20,000.

No fixture in Tunja compares to the one against Boyacá Chicó, a separate club from the same city that plays in the same stadium. Their meetings are known as the Clásico Boyacense, and across 57 of them Patriotas have won 23 to Chicó's 10, with draws more frequent than either scoreline.