Sporting Clube do Livramento

Livramento is a hamlet in the parish of Azueira, deep in the rural inland of Mafra, saloio country of vineyards and threshing floors, and it has had a Sporting since 18 October 1939, when Europe was entering a war and a Portuguese village answered by founding a football club. It is branch number 148 of Sporting Clube de Portugal, lion on the chest beneath the SCL initials, and for more than eight decades it has lived by the motto Atitude, Força, União: attitude, strength, unity. Home is the Campo do Marco, a thousand places of neighbourhood football, and the output is out of all proportion to the size of the land: football at every level from toddlers to veterans, men's and women's futsal, always in the Lisbon district leagues, the championships where everything is at stake except money. Nearing ninety, the club keeps doing what it did in 1939: giving a village in the Mafra countryside a place to be green and white every weekend. There are 148 ways of being Sporting outside Alvalade, and this is one of them.