Sporting

Sporting go into this season as reigning champions of Andebol 1 and holders of the Taça de Portugal, having taken both again in 2025–26. Not since the club last dropped out of the top flight — which is to say never — has the green and white shirt been away from the division's summit for long.

Sporting have added two European Cups along the way, both against the Polish side MMTS Kwidzyn, in 2010 and again in 2017, and have twice reached the Champions League quarter-finals in the two most recent seasons without yet going further.

None of it was guaranteed. In 1995, with the handball section short of money, members were asked directly whether to keep it running alongside futsal, and voted to save it rather than let Sporting's oldest amateur department close. The section has not finished outside the top since.

The rivalry that matters most still runs across Lisbon, against Benfica, sharpened by the same city and the same decades of shared silverware; Porto supply the other fixture nobody takes lightly.

Ricardo Costa has coached the team since 2021, the years in which Sporting turned a strong domestic side back into a European one and pushing the club to its best Champions League finishes in its history.