EC São Bernardo

Four men — Dante Setti, Nerino Colli, Vicente Ragghianti and Itagiba de Almeida — set up a football club in São Bernardo do Campo.

For most of the century that followed, São Bernardo played outside the professional divisions. The zone titles in the amateur and interior competitions came in 1939, then in three consecutive seasons at the end of the 1940s — 1947, 1948, 1949 — and after that the record thins out for decades.

The climb that matters came recently and came quickly. Runners-up in the fourth division in 2017, third in Série A2 in 2018, runners-up in Série A3 in 2020, and champions of Série A2 in 2021. Since then the club has finished third in Série A3 twice, in 2022 and 2024, and fourth in 2023.

Home is the Estádio Municipal Giglio Portugal Pichinin, known to everyone locally as Baetão after the district around it. It once held 8,000; the current figure is 6,315. The club holds the concession on it until 2034.

The black-and-white shirts have earned São Bernardo the nickname Cachorrão. What they have not yet earned is a season above Série A2 — the 2021 title took the club to the top flight of the state, and everything since has been spent in the division below it.