Boavista FC

Boavista FC is a Portuguese football club struggling to survive, due to years and years of corrupt presidents, municipality's money that never arrived and a huge lack of supporters, which in my opinion is the most important reason. I personally think that Boavista FC wouldn't be in this position if we had a mass of people to raise our voice and make us to be heard in the media, as well as to people that can easily influence all the Portuguese football market.

Boavista FC was founded in 1903 by a group of English workers together with a group of Portuguese residents in Oporto city. It was the first team in Portugal to introduce the game and to create a professional football team. It's in the 70's that the club makes a decisive step in its growth, which stopped 2 years ago, with the appearance of financial holes and corruption scandals.

In the year that we see Real Madrid spending a river of money to purchase the player Cristiano Ronaldo, the only Portuguese club that in the last 20 years could really face and challenge the 3 big clubs in Portugal: FC Porto, Benfica and Sporting, being able to win a national title and to be present at the semi finals of Uefa Cup, is about to close doors, and probably what we need is not more than two salaries from the Real Madrid's new star to continue competing.

It is really sad for a supporter like me to see the downfall of a football club with more than 100 years of history, like Boavista FC. The faithful "boavisteiros"(Boavista fans) didn't deserve this scenario.

Our financial descent started surprisingly when we were the national champions of Portugal in 2001. The president and his staff started to spend more than they could, debts began to accumulate and in addition to this Portugal was the host of the Euro 2004. The stadium of the club that just won the national title couldn't stay out of this huge event, so Boavista FC built a stadium with a capacity of 35.000 people when our fans at the time were not more than 20.000. Everyone was happy, what else we could ask? Everything was perfect, the cup and a new stadium, fantastic! But at that time nobody knew what was going on and that our club couldn't afford that kind of investment.
Looking back in time, the only matches that the stadium had 35.000 fans watching was at euro 2004, the only two games we hosted there, and maybe 2 or 3 more when Boavista FC was facing the Portuguese big teams but of course 80% were not our supporters. As you can imagine, it's impossible to have profits in an institution working in these conditions. If we had 10.000, or 15.000 people regularly at the home matches it would be ok, but no, our average was between 4.000 and 5.000!

Even if we can't survive, Boavista FC gave me the opportunity to know how it feels like to be champion in a smaller team, that was great, i'm thankful to the coach and the players for that, they were the real heroes! In that year everyone knew who was Boavista FC, in Portugal and Europe.

Nevertheless, my biggest admiration goes to the people that now, in this very difficult moment, try to bring back the glory to the club, these are the ones that deserve to be champions, the ones that deserve the first pages in newspapers.

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Forces of Corruption

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