08 | LISBON HAS MORE THAN THREE CLUBS

Ask someone unfamiliar with Portuguese football to name a club from Lisbon and the answer will probably be Benfica or Sporting. If they know their history, they might add Belenenses, a club whose own story deserves more than a footnote. The city’s footballing identity is so often presented through these familiar institutions that it is easy to mistake the most visible parts of the landscape for the whole thing. Yet Lisbon has always contained a much larger football world: neighbourhood clubs, local rivalries, amateur grounds, youth teams and generations of players who have passed through its institutions without ever appearing on the front pages of the sports newspapers.

Atlético belongs to that world, although it has never been content to remain entirely within its shadow. Its history is not simply that of a smaller club waiting for one of the giants to decline, nor is its identity dependent on defining itself against Benfica and Sporting. It emerged from Alcântara, developed its own traditions and enjoyed periods when it could compete with the established powers. The ambition now is to discover what that history might mean in a different footballing landscape, one in which Atlético must establish itself again without pretending that the intervening decades have not happened.

The scale of the challenge becomes clearer when you look at Lisbon’s footballing geography. Benfica and Sporting have the reach, resources and international reputations that allow them to attract players from across Portugal and beyond. Belenenses has a distinctive history of its own, while Casa Pia’s roots reach back to the nineteenth century and the early development of organised football in Portugal. Further across the city, Oriental grew from the merging of clubs representing Lisbon’s eastern districts, themselves shaped by neighbourhood loyalties and rivalries. These are not interchangeable institutions, and their histories cannot be reduced to a single story of the capital’s football culture. Each represents a different relationship between sport, place and the people who have sustained it.

For Atlético, that wider landscape matters because the clubs within it do not exist in isolation. Portuguese football’s celebrated academies are supported by an ecosystem of smaller organisations, coaches and communities that help identify and develop players, sometimes long before the major institutions become involved. Benfica’s extensive network of training centres, for example, reflects a deliberate effort to identify talent across the country and prepare players for the demands of its academy. But the relationship between the largest clubs and the smaller ones is not simply a one-way transfer of promising teenagers towards the top. Players move through different environments, develop at different rates and sometimes find their progress interrupted by decisions made when they are still too young to understand their consequences.

Portugal’s reputation for producing technically gifted footballers owes much to the work done within its leading academies, but those academies are not the entire explanation. A player might begin at a local club, join a major academy, be released, and then spend several years rebuilding his career elsewhere; another might develop late, away from the attention of national scouts, before earning an opportunity that changes everything. The movement between these environments is part of the system, even when the public narrative focuses almost exclusively on the players who reach the top. For a club operating outside the elite, understanding that movement could be more valuable than attempting to copy the resources of the institutions above it.

Santi Bentancur is interested in this because he has always been drawn to the question of how players become the footballers they eventually turn into. His education in sports science taught him to think about development as a process rather than a finished product, while his work with children in Lisbon showed him how much progress depends on circumstances that cannot be captured by a technical assessment alone. The best player at thirteen is not necessarily the best at seventeen, and the player who struggles to adapt to one environment may flourish in another. Talent is real, but so are timing, opportunity, confidence and the quality of the people responsible for helping a young footballer understand the game.

Atlético does not need to convince every promising teenager in Lisbon to reject Benfica or Sporting. Nor can it assume that every player released by a larger academy will automatically become an asset. The opportunity lies in understanding which players might benefit from a different environment, which have been overlooked because their development has not followed a predictable path, and which need something more than another change of club. That requires good scouting, but also patience, relationships and coaches who can distinguish between a player who has reached his limits and one who has simply not found the right conditions in which to improve.

It is an attractive idea, although the practical difficulties should not be understated. The larger clubs have greater resources, better facilities and the ability to offer young players a pathway towards the professional game that smaller institutions may struggle to match. Atlético must compete within those realities, not imagine them away. Its task is to identify where it can offer something worthwhile, whether through playing opportunities, individual development, a different tactical education or the possibility of becoming an important player at a club where he might otherwise remain peripheral. None of this guarantees success, but it offers a way to think about recruitment that begins with the needs of the player as well as the needs of the team.

The division in which Atlético competes adds another dimension to that work. Liga 3 was introduced in 2021–22 to give the third tier a more distinct competitive structure, sitting between the professional Segunda Liga and the Campeonato de Portugal. It brings together clubs with different histories and ambitions, including established names attempting to recover lost ground and smaller institutions trying to turn a successful period into sustained progress. Its geographical divisions and promotion stages give the competition a character of its own, but for now the details of the format matter less than what the league represents: a level at which the ambition to climb must coexist with the practical work of building a squad capable of competing every week.

For Santi, this is the footballing world he has entered. The challenge is not to find a shortcut past it, but to understand it well enough to make intelligent decisions within it. He will need to learn which clubs develop the kinds of players Atlético can use, which coaches share his interest in development, and where a relationship might be mutually beneficial rather than merely convenient. He will also need to recognise that a player’s value is not always obvious from his reputation, his previous club or the circumstances of his departure.

Lisbon offers many routes into football, but not every route leads to the same destination. Some players will reach the top through the city’s most celebrated academies; others will build their careers through a succession of smaller clubs, each contributing something that the next environment can use. Atlético has its own history, its own supporters and its own responsibilities, and it does not need to become a smaller version of Benfica or Sporting to have a meaningful place in that landscape.

The first task is to understand the people, clubs and pathways around it, then work out where Atlético can offer something different. Before Santi can decide which players to bring through the door at Tapadinha, he must learn to recognise the paths that lead them there.