Recreativo Huelva

Promotion to La Liga in 2006 came with the Segunda División title, and it opened three seasons in the top flight that the club had waited more than a century to reach. Nine months earlier, in December, they had beaten Real Madrid 3–0 at home, a game played in tribute to four supporters killed in a coach crash, and it remains the result the club is remembered for from that era. The Copa del Rey final of 2003, reached under Lucas Alcaraz, ended in defeat, the closest El Decano has come to that trophy.

The nickname says what the club is: founded in December 1889 by British and Spanish residents tied to the Rio Tinto mining company. That seniority sat oddly with what followed. La Liga survival ran out in 2008–09, and the debts behind the relegation pushed the club into bankruptcy proceedings. The administrative penalties that followed sent them all the way down to the Tercera División, a level the club had never occupied in its history.

Climbing back out took over a decade. The Tercera División title of 2022 marked the turn, and consecutive promotions since have carried Recreativo up to the Primera Federación, where they now play in Group II. San Roque de Lepe remain the fixture that matters most locally, contested as the Gran Derbi Onubense.