Santa Clara

The 2020/21 season ended with Santa Clara sixth in the Primeira Liga, a finish that sent the club from Ponta Delgada into the UEFA Europa Conference League. Daniel Ramos was in charge of that campaign, and it capped a run that had started only three years earlier, when Carlos Pinto took the club up to the top flight and broke a run of fifteen straight seasons in the second division.

Getting there took decades. Santa Clara traces itself to a movement that grew out of local tournaments played on São Miguel between 1919 and 1920, under the same name the club still carries. A first board was elected in May 1927, statutes were approved the following month, and the club played its first official match that November. Two promotions from the fourth tier in 1990 and 1996 and a third-division title in 1998 marked the slow climb before Manuel Fernandes finally took the team into the Primeira Liga for the first time after winning the Segunda in 2000/01.

One player did more than any other to put the club's name on Portuguese football before any of that: Pauleta started his career at Santa Clara between 1990 and 1992, years before he became the leading scorer in the history of the Portugal national team.

The club has played at the Estádio de São Miguel since 1976, in red shirts with white shorts. Domestic cup runs have stopped short of a final — quarter-finals in the Taça de Portugal, a semi-final in the Taça da Liga — but the club returned to the Segunda in 2023/24 and won it under Vasco Matos, going straight back up.