San Miguel FC

Sergio Schulmeister spent his time between the posts at San Miguel, the goalkeeper the club treats as its own even though the record of what he actually won there has faded with the years. That habit of holding onto a face rather than a trophy list says something about a club that has spent most of its life outside the top division, in the lower rungs of Argentine football where Club Atlético San Miguel has made its home since 1922.

It began that year as Club Independiente San Miguel, in the city of the same name in Buenos Aires province. A merger with Club Germinal, from nearby Villa Lynch, briefly renamed the side Germinal de San Miguel in 1930; the arrangement lasted barely a year before it was undone and the club settled on the name it carries now.

The green shirt gave the club its nickname before it gave it much else. In its first season in the second division, a strong run of results earned it "El Trueno Verde" — the Green Thunder — a name that has outlasted most of what the team achieved in the years around it. San Miguel's history since has run in cycles of promotion and relegation rather than sustained success: up from Primera D in 1979, up again to Primera B in 1984, then the high point of the 1996-97 season, when the title in Primera B Metropolitana sent the club into the second tier of the national pyramid, where it still plays today. A drop back to Primera C followed in 2001, a further fall to Primera D in 2013, and a return the following year — before the 2016-17 title in Primera C brought the club back up again.

Home games are played at Estadio Malvinas Argentinas, on José León Suárez in Los Polvorines, a ground built for a crowd in the thousands rather than the tens of thousands, and one that has not needed to hold more.