I need to start this by saying something I genuinely never thought I'd write. Not in a million years. Not if you gave me a thousand guesses about how the 2025/26 Portuguese football season would end.
Torreense won the Taça de Portugal.
Torreense. The team from Torres Vedras. The team that plays in the SECOND DIVISION. The team whose only previous final appearance was in 1956 — seventy years ago — when they lost 2-0 to FC Porto. The team that most casual football fans couldn't have located on a map three months ago. That team just beat Sporting 2-1 after extra time at the Estádio Nacional and became the first club from outside the top flight to win the Taça de Portugal in eighty-six editions of the competition.
I'm going to let that sink in for a second because I don't think the magnitude of what just happened has fully hit anyone yet.
Eighty-six editions. In all that time — across decades of Portuguese football history, through Eusébio and Futre and Figo and Ronaldo, through dynasties and revolutions and golden generations — no team below the Primeira Liga had ever lifted the prova rainha. Not once. Not ever. Until today. Until Stopira, the Torreense captain, buried a penalty past Rui Silva at the 113th minute and an entire town lost its collective mind.
I wrote about Sporting in the semi-finals a few weeks ago. They'd gone to the Dragão and held FC Porto to a 0-0 draw to reach the final on aggregate. I said something like "The Jamor awaits. And honestly? After a week like this, Sporting probably feel like they can survive anything." I actually believed it. After the derby collapse, after the AFS draw, after all the setbacks — the Taça was supposed to be the consolation prize. The thing that saved the season. The one trophy Rui Borges could hold up and say "look, it wasn't all bad."
Instead, it became the final humiliation. And I genuinely feel bad writing that because Rui Borges seems like a good man and a decent coach, but there's no sugarcoating what happened today at the Jamor. Sporting — the vice-champions of Portugal, the team that just sealed Champions League football for next season, the defending Taça holders — lost to a second division team. In a final. At the Estádio Nacional. On national television. With the whole country watching.
How? How does this happen?
Let me walk through it.
The first four minutes that changed everything
Borges named the same eleven that played the last league game. Same formation, same personnel. He said afterwards that he'd warned his players about nervousness, about taking the occasion too seriously, about letting the pressure get to them. And then, four minutes into the game, every single one of those fears materialized.
Set piece. Simple ball into the box. Léo Azevedo rose above everyone — and I mean everyone, including Morita who was supposed to be marking the near post area — and headed the ball across goal. Kévin Zohi was standing at the far post, completely alone, completely unmarked, and he just had to redirect it into the net. Which he did. Four minutes. 1-0 Torreense.
The Estádio Nacional went absolutely silent on the Sporting side. On the other end, the Torreense fans — and there were a LOT of them, way more than anyone expected — erupted. I've been to a few cup finals at the Jamor and I've never heard a noise like that from a "small" team's fans. It was visceral. It was primal. It was the sound of people who couldn't believe what they were witnessing and decided to scream about it before reality caught up.
Now, here's the thing. Sporting had the entire rest of the game to respond. Forty-one minutes of the first half. The whole second half. They had Luis Suárez, the league's top scorer. They had Trincão. They had Geny Catamo. They had Hjulmand and Morita in midfield. They had approximately 400 million euros worth of squad against a team whose entire payroll is probably less than what Sporting pay for their under-19 canteen.
And for forty-five minutes, they couldn't do a thing about it.
Torreense's masterclass in suffering
This is what I want to talk about. Because the narrative is going to be about Sporting's failure — the newspapers are already writing that angle, the pundits are already sharpening their knives for Rui Borges — but that completely ignores what Torreense actually DID out there. They didn't just park the bus and pray. They executed a defensive plan with a discipline and intensity that would have made Simeone send them a congratulatory text.
Luís Tralhão — remember that name, because every single Primeira Liga club should be on the phone to his agent tomorrow morning — set his team up in a compact 4-4-2 low block that Sporting simply could not penetrate. The distances between the lines were perfect. The pressing triggers were well-timed. When Sporting tried to play through the middle, there were always two bodies in the way. When they tried to go wide, the Torreense full-backs collapsed the space before the cross could come in. When they tried to play over the top, the centre-backs were positioned deep enough to deal with it.
Lucas Paes in the Torreense goal had the game of his life. He saved from Suárez at point-blank range in the 41st minute — a reaction stop that had no right to be saved. He claimed every cross like they belonged to him. He organized his defense with the authority of someone who's done this a thousand times, even though he absolutely has not done this a thousand times, because this was a TAÇA DE PORTUGAL FINAL and he plays in the second division.
The half-time whistle blew. 1-0 Torreense. The Sporting fans were stunned. The Torreense fans were delirious. And everyone watching at home was thinking the same thing: surely Sporting will sort this out in the second half, right? Surely.
Suárez equalizes. But the story isn't over.
Borges clearly had words at half-time because Sporting came out with a completely different energy. Higher pressing, more urgency, more bodies in the box. And it worked. On 54 minutes, a loose ball in the Torreense area — Diadié tried to clear but it bounced off Maxi Araújo and fell to Suárez. The Colombian turned on Stopira, created just enough space, and fired past Lucas Paes. 1-1.
Alvalade's traveling support woke up. You could feel the momentum shift. This was the moment. Sporting were going to take over, score a second, win 2-1 or 3-1, and everyone would say "gave us a scare but class told in the end" and we'd all move on.
Except Torreense didn't get that memo.
They absorbed the goal, regrouped, and went back to doing exactly what they'd been doing before. Compact. Disciplined. Fearless. The block reformed. The distances stayed tight. Sporting kept pushing but the penetration just wasn't there. Geny Catamo actually put the ball in the net around the 70th minute but VAR ruled it offside. Hjulmand headed over from a corner when he should have scored. Suárez had a half-chance that he dragged wide. The chances were there but Sporting couldn't convert.
Ninety minutes. 1-1. Extra time.
And in the back of my mind, a little voice was saying: "Sporting have been here before this season." Three extra time games in this cup run. They beat Braga after extra time in the quarters. They ground out results when it went long. Surely their experience of going the distance would count.
The first period of extra time was cagey. Both teams were tired. Torreense actually had a goal disallowed — Diadié scored but was flagged offside. Sporting pushed without any real conviction. Fifteen minutes passed. Nothing happened. The second period started and you could see penalty shootouts written all over this game.
And then the 113th minute happened.
The moment that made history
Ismail Seydi. Remember that name too. The Torreense forward picked up the ball on the halfway line, turned, and ran. He got behind the Sporting defense — which was pushed absurdly high because they were chasing the game — and into the penalty area. Maxi Araújo, the Uruguayan left-back who'd had a miserable game, lunged at him from behind. Contact. Seydi went down.
The referee looked at the monitor. VAR confirmed it. Penalty to Torreense. Red card for Maxi Araújo.
The Jamor held its breath.
Stopira. The captain. The centre-back who'd been throwing his body in front of everything all game. The man who'd organized the defense, who'd won every aerial duel, who'd been the literal wall between Sporting and the goal. He picked up the ball, placed it on the spot, and looked at Rui Silva.
And he didn't miss.
Low, hard, to the right. Rui Silva went the right way but it was too powerful, too well-placed. 2-1 Torreense. The 113th minute of a Taça de Portugal final.
What happened next is something I will never forget. The Torreense bench emptied. Players sprinted onto the pitch. Staff members were crying — actual tears, streaming down their faces. In the stands, grown men were sobbing. Men were screaming. Children were being held up by their parents to see the moment. It was raw, unfiltered, beautiful human emotion.
There were still minutes to play. Sporting, now down to ten men, threw Rui Silva up for corners in desperation. There was a scramble in the box where the ball was hacked clear. There was one last Torreense counter-attack where Drammeh broke free as Rui Silva was still in the opposition box — he had the empty net, the chance to make it 3-1, and somehow missed. On any other day, that miss would be a meme. Today, nobody cares. Nobody will even remember it tomorrow.
The whistle blew. Stopira fell to his knees. The team piled on top of him. And from the stands came the roar — the roar of a town of 40,000 people who'd just witnessed the most extraordinary thing their football club has ever done, and probably ever will do.
What this means — beyond the trophy
Let me put this into perspective because the numbers alone are staggering.
Torreense are the first club from below the Primeira Liga to win the Taça de Portugal in 86 editions of the competition. Let me say that again. EIGHTY-SIX. This isn't some mickey mouse cup that gets upset regularly. This is the prova rainha. Benfica have won it 26 times. Porto 20 times. Sporting 18 times. The idea that a second division team could beat one of the Big Three in the final was so absurd that the pre-match betting odds had Sporting at something like 1.15. One-point-fifteen. That's essentially "free money if you bet on Sporting." Except it wasn't free. And a lot of people are very unhappy at the bookmakers right now.
The Torreense squad cost — in total transfer fees — a fraction of what Sporting paid for Maxi Araújo alone. Their top scorer this season in the league has eight goals. EIGHT. Sporting's top scorer has twenty-six. The wage disparity is probably something like 15 to 1. This is David and Goliath except David didn't just knock Goliath down, he took his sling, sold it on eBay, and used the money to buy a trip to the Europa League.
Because yes — Torreense are going to EUROPE. A team from the Portuguese second division will play in the group stage of the Europa League next season. Torres Vedras. In European competition. Against teams from Spain, Germany, Italy, England. I genuinely cannot wrap my head around it. Their stadium holds about 5,000 people. They're going to need to find a bigger one.
And the ripple effects on the European spots are massive. Benfica, who thought they were in the Champions League third qualifying round, now drop to the second qualifying round — an extra game they weren't expecting, which is a headache for Mourinho's pre-season planning. Braga, who were supposed to be in the Europa League after their incredible semi-final run, now drop to the Conference League qualifying rounds instead. And Famalicão? Famalicão are out of Europe entirely. Hugo Oliveira's side, who finished fifth and thought they had a Conference League spot locked down, just got bumped out by a club from the division below. That's brutal.
The Sporting post-mortem
For Sporting, this is the worst possible ending to a season that started with genuine title aspirations. Let's count the ways this went wrong.
They lost the league to Porto by a mile. They lost the derby to Benfica in the most heartbreaking way imaginable — the disallowed goal, the Rafa winner. They drew with AFS, the already-relegated bottom team. And now they've lost the Taça de Portugal final to a second division side.
Zero titles. The defending champions of the Taça, the vice-champions of the league, ended the season with absolutely nothing. Rui Borges said in the press conference that the nervousness got to his players and that he takes responsibility. I believe him on both counts but I also think the problems run deeper than nerves.
This Sporting team, for all its talent, has a psychological fragility that's been exposed repeatedly this season. When things go wrong — when they concede first, when the crowd turns, when the pressure mounts — they don't have the mentality to fight through it. They had 110 minutes after Zohi's goal to turn this game around. They managed one equalizer and a disallowed goal. Against a second division team. At home, essentially, given the Jamor is twenty minutes from Alvalade. That's not bad luck. That's a mentality problem.
Suárez missed the penalty in the derby. He scored today but was anonymous for long stretches. Trincão, who's been brilliant in patches this season, disappeared when it mattered most. Morita — the man who seems to be at the center of every disaster this season, between the derby handball and now the poor marking on Zohi's goal — had another game to forget.
The fans, to their credit, stayed until the end. They applauded the team despite the defeat. But you could see it in their faces — the exhaustion, the frustration, the "here we go again" resignation that comes from watching your team bottle it one too many times. This was supposed to be the night that saved everything. Instead, it became the exclamation point on a season of disappointment.
Give Torreense their moment
But enough about Sporting. I don't want to end this piece talking about the team that lost. I want to end it talking about the team that won. Because what Torreense did today deserves to be celebrated properly, not used as a footnote in someone else's crisis.
Luís Tralhão built something special in Torres Vedras. A team with no stars, no budget, no history in finals — and he turned them into giant killers. They beat Estoril in the semis to get here. They beat Vitória de Guimarães in the quarters. They went through round after round, nobody taking them seriously, nobody giving them a chance, and they just kept winning.
Stopira, the captain, gave the post-match interview with tears in his eyes and the trophy in his hands. He said something about the team being a family, about believing when nobody else did, about Torres Vedras deserving this moment. And you know what? For once, the cliché felt real. This isn't a team of mercenaries collecting their paychecks. This is a group of players — most of whom will never play in the Primeira Liga, most of whom will never make a fraction of what Sporting's reserves earn — who came to the Jamor and outfought, outthought, and outlasted the defending champions.
The rest of us? We just witnessed something that will be talked about for decades. The night a second division team conquered Portuguese football's oldest trophy for the first time in eighty-six years of trying.
Football. Honestly. You couldn't make it up.