Lacatoni, MKA, Desportreino, Paulas Benara, Fair Play, Les Olympiades: the small, local brands that dress most of the green and white hoops in the archive, and why their shirts tell more than those of the giants.
On Hoopster's brands pages, the three or four multinationals everyone knows sit at the top of the list. But the list is long, and the further down you go, the more interesting it gets. Names with no shop in any mall, no national team to sponsor, sometimes not even a website. These are the brands of the land: teamwear made a few kilometres from the club that wears it, for a district-league pitch, a works team or a village anniversary. And they carry most of the green and white hoops in this archive.
The Minho dresses the country
If Portugal has a capital of sportswear, it sits between Braga and Guimarães. Lacatoni was born in Braga in 1988 with a name that is an anagram of its three founders, one of them a certain Carlos Carvalhal, and in a single autumn of 2009 it dressed seven top-flight clubs. In the archive it appears on shirts as different as the Caçadores das Taipas of 2009/10, a squad shirt with its number cracked by use, and the Sporting da Covilhã centenary shirt of 2022/23, with a gold seal and a polo collar. In 2026 the brand changed hands, but the name keeps turning up on pitches across the country.
A few kilometres away, MKA represents the next generation: founded in 2009, it pioneered sublimation in Portugal, the technique that prints the whole shirt in one pass and allows gradients, textures and half a dozen village sponsors on the same fabric. The Caçadores das Taipas shirt of 2022/23 is the perfect example: the tavern, the parish council, the computer shop, all printed rather than stitched. Alongside it, AFD Sportware, from Braga, whose motto gives it its initials ("Assim se Faz Desporto", this is how sport is made) and whose online footprint is close to zero, dressed Leça in 2015/16, in the Porto district leagues, with wide hoops and an embroidered crest topped by a mural crown. And Offside, a Braga sports shop, signs the shirt of Sporting de Cabreiros, a parish of Braga that has worn the lion since 1932.
Further south, Desportreino, from Avintes in Gaia, lived through the years when a Portuguese brand could still reach the top flight: the Naval 1.º de Maio shirt of 2009/10, with the Liga Sagres stamp on the hem, and the Sporting da Covilhã shirt of 2010/11, with the Liga Orangina patch on the sleeve, came off the same machines. Then come the brands of a single shirt, or nearly: Belma for Ançã, King for Ferreirense with a lion in its logo, Playoff for GDC Ferreira, Guro for the shirts from Mafra, Juvan, which gave Castro Daire hoops made of tiny names, CDT, which drew the city of Lamego inside the stripes. Many carry "made in Portugal" on the label the way others carry a signature.
The shirt made for one club only
What these brands share, at home and abroad, is scale. A multinational designs one template and sells it to a hundred clubs; a brand of the land designs for one. The 40th anniversary shirt of AS Conchil, a village in the Pas-de-Calais, was made by Les Olympiades, from Socx near Dunkirk: 121 pieces, with Templar knights sublimated into the bottom hoop and a campsite as second sponsor. The brand, taken over in 2016 by a local businessman, received a notice in 2024 from the organising committee of the Paris Games asking it to change its name, and today it is called Onivo. None of those three sentences fits on a Nike shirt.
In Lyon, GladiaSport, from Caluire-et-Cuire, dressed the university rugby side of KTOCAM, a match shirt with no fixed owner that passed from student to student. In the Netherlands, Robey made the SV Heinenoord shirt. In Italy, the Serie D and Eccellenza shirts of the 1990s and 2000s come from Urbani, Biemme, Essegi, names only the supporters of those provinces recognise.
The Yeovil tender
The archive's most revealing story about small brands takes place in Somerset. In 2003, Yeovil Town were going up to the Football League for the first time and opened a tender for a new kit supplier. The Italian firm Essegi submitted a sample, in green and white hoops, that never became official. The contract went to Paulas Benara, a brand from Ambergate in Derbyshire that had dressed Boston United since 1991 and Yeovil since 1999. The archive holds both: the losing sample and the winning shirt, which served in the Football League debut and lifted League Two the following year. Paulas Benara changed its name in 2010 and was dissolved in 2025. Without these two shirts, the Yeovil tender would exist nowhere at all.
Brands with a face
Some brands of the land have a face. MT65 belongs to Marius Trésor, the French centre-back of Seville 82, with his 65 caps in the name; the FC Sète youth shirt of 1988/89 carries the "marque déposée" label and a local pastry chef on the chest. Fair Play, from Bolivia, was founded in 1977 by Ismael Maldonado as a distributor and ended up signing shirts under its own name; the Oriente Petrolero shirt of 2010 reached the shops in May, before the team ever wore it, while the players insisted on another design out of superstition. Pirma, from San Francisco del Rincón in Mexico, dressed Club León for thirteen years and made the 2015/16 away shirt that sits in the archive. In Brazil, Kanxa for Icasa and Amalfi for Altos, with the brand's "A" drawn inside the number itself, dress the middle of the pyramid the big names ignore. In Turkey, Tryon made the Bodrumspor shirt of 2014/15, the year the club left the amateur ranks to begin the climb that ended in the Süper Lig.
Why this matters
A shirt from a small brand is almost always a shirt of proximity: the factory twenty kilometres from the pitch, the brand's owner in the stand, the sponsor on the next street. It is also, very often, a shirt that cannot be bought again, because a hundred were made and nobody kept the pattern. That is why, in this archive, a district-league teamwear shirt can be worth more than a shop replica: it tells a whole economy, a region and an era in the space of a chest.
Here at Hoopster, the brands of the land are not the collection's secondary section. They are the reason it exists. Anyone can find the hoops of a giant; finding the hoops of a brand that no longer exists, stitched for a club that still does, is what makes the search worth it.