2021/22 · Home

A working B-Sport with Cabinda's entire economy stacked on its chest: state owned Sonangol above, Chevron below, the two powers that contest the enclave's subsoil on the same cloth, and the triangular SCSC crest with Alvalade's lion inside. A clean back, no number: a club shirt, not a player's.

It served around 2021/22, with the Lions of the North on the eternal shuttle of Angola's divisions, and it tells one of the most singular stories of the lion diaspora: branch number thirty one, founded in 1925, separated from the mother club by independence and renamed by oil, which never managed to take away its hoops or its lion.

Here at Hoopster this lion tells the harder version of the diaspora: it was not born of the longing of those who left, it was born of empire, outlived it, and when even its name was changed, the hoops remained. Some loyalties not even a century can undo.