Benfica

Benfica open the new Primeira Liga season from a stadium that has only just reopened. Estádio da Luz was rebuilt and handed back to the club in July 2025, now holding 68,100 inside the Lisbon ground that has carried the Benfica name for decades.

The club itself goes back further, to 28 February 1904, when it started out as Sport Lisboa. Red and white have stayed the colours since, and the eagle on the crest is where the nickname The Eagles comes from — supporters call the shirt itself Os Encarnados.

Benfica's two European Cup wins came in successive finals: 1960/61 against Barcelona, 3-2, and 1961/62 against Real Madrid, 5-3. Eusébio was already on the books by the second of those. He went on to score 473 goals in 440 appearances for the club. In 1965 he won the Ballon d'Or, a season no one else at Benfica has since matched.

No other Portuguese club has won more than Benfica's 38 league titles or 26 Portuguese Cups. Sporting, across the city, and Porto remain the fixtures that carry the most weight, the Lisbon derby and O Clássico still shaping how a season is judged.

What Benfica have not done since 1962 is win in Europe again. Five more European Cup finals were lost in the years that followed, and all three finals reached in the UEFA Cup and Europa League — 1982, 2012, 2013 — ended the same way.