SC Braga

Braga are still living with the shape of a defeat only months old. In 2026 they reached a second Europa League final and lost it, fifteen years after the first, when Jorge Jesus took them to the 2011 final and Porto beat them 0-1 in the first all-Portuguese decider the competition had seen. Domestic cups have come easier than that European trophy: three Taças de Portugal, the last in 2021, and three league cups, the most recent in 2024.

The club began on 19 January 1921, founded by a group of students who followed Sporting in Lisbon closely enough to borrow the name and, at first, the green-and-white kit. The colours changed later to red and white, taken this time from Arsenal, and the likeness was close enough that the nickname Arsenalistas has outlasted every other one the club has picked up along the way.

One line in the record books belongs to Braga alone: they were the last club to win the UEFA Intertoto Cup, in 2008, before the competition was scrapped for good. The Taça da FPF sits the same way in their history, won once, in 1977, and never contested again by anyone else.

Derby do Minho, against Vitória de Guimarães, is still the fixture the region orders its season around. Ricardo Horta has stayed through much of the recent run of finals and cups while others who came up through the club, among them Diego Costa and Rúben Amorim as a player before he returned to coach, moved on.

Games are played at the Estádio Municipal de Braga, cut into a rock quarry on the edge of the city and known locally, for exactly that reason, as A Pedreira. It holds 30,286, and on European nights the stone walls behind each end give the noise somewhere to go.