The Strongest

The Strongest arrive at this season carrying the weight of 16 Primera División titles, the most recent from 2023, and the nickname El Decano, the Dean. The tag fits a club still measured by three consecutive championships between 2011 and 2013 under Eduardo Villegas, a run that made them the country's first three-time-in-a-row winners, and by 2003, when Néstor Clausen's side became the first Bolivian club to sweep both the Apertura and Clausura in a single year.

None of that explains why the shirt still carries a certain gravity in La Paz beyond the trophy count. On 26 September 1969, a Douglas DC-6B carrying the squad to a match crashed into Mount Choquetanga. Seventeen first-team players died, along with the coach, Eustaquio Ortuño, and the club's staff — 74 people in total. Only three players survived, kept off the flight by chance. Club president Rafael Mendoza rebuilt the squad with help from other sides, Boca Juniors among them, and the man's name now belongs to the alternate stadium the club still uses on occasion.

The regular home remains Estadio Hernando Siles, reseated in 2007 and holding 41,143 under the black-and-yellow stripes that gave the club its other nickname, Tigre. Founded on 8 April 1908 by twelve students under José León López Villamil, the side started life as Strong Foot Ball Club before a registration clerk's rewording left it as The Strongest — a name it kept trimming and restoring over the following decades until it settled into its current form in 1931.

None of it matters more on a Sunday than the fixture against Bolívar.