Santa Clara Sporting Club

Santa Clara Sporting was born in 1971 at the hands of a group of Portuguese emigrants in Silicon Valley who wanted a team in the Peninsula Soccer League, and it dressed like the club they carried in their hearts: green and white, a rampant lion, a crest drawn in the image of Alvalade's. In the eighties it opened a youth programme and the child of saudade became a power: today it is one of the oldest and most decorated youth clubs in the United States, with over 650 players across 35 teams, decades of state and national titles, more than fifty US youth internationals developed and names like Brandi Chastain, the legend of the 99 World Cup, among its coaches. The Green and White Tradition, as the club itself calls it, still rules in Santa Clara.