Guarabira

When the original club folded in 2004 under the weight of its debts, Guarabira did not stay without football for long: a new institution, Associação Desportiva Guarabira, was put together the following year to carry on where Guarabira Esporte Clube had left off, taking the blue and white and the badge. The date given for that first club, June 1936, sat on records that had by then stopped mattering to anyone but historians.

Under the old crest, the club's ceiling had been modest — third in the state's top flight back in 1969, a runner-up finish in the second division in 1995. The reborn Desportiva has done rather better by that measure: promotion in its first year back, then the Campeonato Paraibano da Segunda Divisão title in 2009, beating Auto Esporte 1–0 in the final. Since then it has been a story of yo-yoing, up in 2018 and straight back down in 2019, the kind of instability that second-tier clubs in Paraíba live with as a matter of course.

Roberto Dinamite once turned out for Guarabira in a one-off guest appearance in 1991, the sort of detail that still gets repeated around the ground. Pedrinho Cangula also passed through, a name now attached as much to his son Marcelinho Paraíba as to his own playing days.

The rivalry that means most locally is with Cruzeiro-PB, from neighbouring Itaporanga, and those derbies carry the weight of the Brejo Paraibano region rather than of the wider state. Home games are played in front of four thousand at the Estádio Municipal Sílvio Porto, in a city that, for a club with this history, has rarely had reason to expect much more than a full house and a fight to stay up.