Second-tier Beira-Mar played in the 1999-2000 Uefa Cup, although they were a top-flight team at the time of qualifying. But Torreense are the first team from the second division to qualify by winning the Taca de Portugal.<\/p>\n
“The Portuguese Cup has been played since 1938 in its current model and it was the first time that a second division team won it,” Portuguese football journalist and ex-Benfica goalkeeper Jose Delgado tells BBC Sport.<\/p>\n
“You can imagine when they could defeat a giant club like Sporting in the final, it was quite a surprise and for the city, it’s something very, very special.”<\/p>\n
After beating Lillestrom, they have already exceeded the expectations of some.<\/p>\n
“I thought that Torreense could go through the Europa League with no points,” adds Delgado. “The truth is that they already have three points and that is something.<\/p>\n
“It’s something that I don’t think will ever happen again in Portuguese football. But Torreense has this.”<\/p>\n
With Portugal ranked outside Uefa’s top five leagues, every club in the Champions League, Europa League or Conference League has a responsibility to perform well to earn their nation important ranking points.<\/p>\n
“For Portuguese football, everybody [thought it] was nice that a club like Torreense won the cup, but also we had some concerns,” says Delgado.<\/p>\n
“The first game everybody thought that Torreense had no chance against Lillestrom and they won. It was quite a good surprise. But it’s like a fairytale for Torreense because they are a small club.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Second-tier Beira-Mar played in the 1999-2000 Uefa Cup, although they were a top-flight team at the time of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":883043,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":["post-883042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=883042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883042\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/883043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=883042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=883042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=883042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}