Santa Rita

Before Santa Rita meant a football club, it meant a project for kids from the periphery of Várzea Nova, run under the name Associação Atlética Santa Rita in a neighbourhood of the same name. Only later did the association turn professional, buy up the rights to the defunct Internacional-PB and shift its base south to Itapororoca, where it plays now.

The move brought a stadium, the Estádio José Ribeiro, known locally as Ribeirão, and it brought a problem: the legal tangle left behind by Internacional-PB kept Santa Rita out of the 2024 season entirely. It returned to competition only in 2026, this time in partnership with Itapororoca FC, taking on that club's kit of blue, white and red for the campaign rather than its own blue and white.

Between the founding and the return sits the one line of history the club can point to: runner-up in the Campeonato Paraibano Terceira Divisão in 2023.

Founded in 2017, the club is not yet a decade old.