Bahia

The Arena Fonte Nova stands where the old Estádio Otávio Mangabeira stood, in the bowl of ground below Salvador's upper city. It holds 50 025, and Bahia fill it more often than most clubs in the north-east manage. The arena is the club's home ground rather than a rented showpiece, and matchdays there — particularly against Vitória, the city rivals, in the Ba-Vi — are the fixture around which the rest of the season arranges itself.

The club was put together on 1 January 1931, and it won the state championship that same year. That set a pattern it has never really broken: 52 Campeonato Baiano titles, the most recent of them this year. Whole decades pass in that list without a gap of more than two or three seasons. Blue, white and red come from the state flag.

What lifted Bahia beyond Bahia was 1959. The club won the first Taça Brasil, the competition that decided the national champion before the league format existed, and did it as a side from the north-east at a time when the trophies moved between Rio and São Paulo. Nearly three decades later, in 1988, they took the Campeonato Brasileiro Série A. Those two remain the whole of the national haul.

Closer to home, the Copa do Nordeste has been kinder — five wins, the first two in consecutive years at the start of the 2000s, the latest in 2025. Fortaleza are the regional obstacle there.

The long silence sits in the middle of the record. Since 1988 the club has not won a national title, and the Taça Brasil belongs to a competition that no longer exists. Everything Bahia have added in the past twenty years has been won inside the state or inside the region.