Leones FC

In 2014 a group of investors bought a modest, unremarkable side, gave it a new name and moved it, wholesale, to the port town of Turbo. Two years later they moved it again, this time to Itagüí, on the edge of Medellín, and only then did the club settle into the identity it plays under today. The team the investors had bought traced back to 1944, when it was founded as Deportivo Rionegro — a name and a place it left behind twice before finding a permanent home.

Itagüí gave the club more than an address. It shaped what Leones FC became: a fixture of Primera B, Colombia's second tier, where it has topped the table three times, in 2017, 2021 and 2022. The 2017 title, won in the Águila tournament, carried the club into the top flight. It didn't stay there long, but the return trips to promotion contention kept coming. In 2022 Leones reached the Primera B grand final and lost to Boyacá Chicó on penalties, missing out on a second shot at Colombia's top division by the smallest possible margin.

One name still carries weight around the club, even briefly attached to it: René Higuita, the goalkeeper who made a career out of doing the unexpected between the posts, turned out for the side in 2008, back when it still played under its earlier identity. Luis Amaranto Perea, a defender with his own history in the Colombian game, took over as head coach in 2018.

The team now plays in yellow and green and is known to its own as Los Felinos — the cats. Its home is the Estadio Metropolitano Ciudad de Itagüí, a ground built for just over 12,000, in a city that spent years watching a club with someone else's name pass through before this one finally stayed.