Benfica B

The one trophy that matters sits from 2004–05, a Terceira Divisão title, Portugal's third tier, won at a level no one associates with a club carrying the Benfica crest. It stayed the only piece of silverware for two decades, through a spell when the team did not even exist: shut down in 2006, it returned only on 28 May 2012, after the Portuguese league changed its rules to let top-flight clubs run a "B" side in the Segunda Liga.

That return set the terms under which Benfica B still operates. No promotion is possible, whatever the league table says, and no cup runs either — Taça de Portugal and Taça da Liga are both closed to it. Fourth place, reached in 2016–17, 2018–19 and again in 2024–25, is as high as the second tier has let it climb.

The point was never the table. Víctor Lindelöf played 96 matches here between 2012 and 2015 before his move to Manchester United; Renato Sanches made his debut in October 2014, still a teenager. Ferro, Bruno Varela, Diogo Gonçalves and Gonçalo Ramos all passed through the same dressing room on their way to the first team or elsewhere, and Herberto Tavares left as the side's top scorer in the Segunda Liga with 25 goals. Bruno Lage coached here before he ever stood on Benfica's own touchline.

Matches against the other clubs' reserve sides carry their own weight — the Clássico B against Porto's B team, the Derby B against Sporting — though the fixtures draw little of the attention their senior equivalents do. Home games are played at the Benfica Campus in Seixal, a 2,644-seat ground built for exactly this kind of football, far smaller than anything the first team uses.

Two decades on from that single Terceira Divisão crown, Benfica B still has nothing to show above it — no Segunda Liga title, no route upward, only the players it sends on.