Casa Pia: The Geese Soaring High in Portugal’s Top-flight
When it comes to Portuguese football, three clubs typically dominate the attention of fans and outsiders: Benfica, Porto, and Sporting. After all, since the advent of Portugal’s top division in 1934, the championship has been won by one of these ‘Three Giants’ — with the exception of Belenenses 1945/46 and Boavista 2000/01. However, there is one team that, despite never winning the league title, has been one of the most influential clubs in the history of Portuguese football: Casa Pia (or Pious House).
Most of Portugal’s biggest clubs originated during the turn of the 20th century, but as for Casa Pia, their roots stretch back even further. Following the social disarray of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, the Portuguese magistrate Dr. Diogo Inácio de Pina Manique founded the Casa Pia institute in 1780. Over the next 200+ years, Casa Pia has raised thousands of young boys and girls and served to help educate underprivileged children in the Lisbon area who were either in risk of social exclusion or who had lost their parents.
In 1893, a group of students formed the Real Casa Pia de Lisboa football team. Five years later, they became the first team to defeat the Carcavellos Club — a group composed of British workers at the Underwater Cable Station, and a team that, up until that moment, had never lost to a Portuguese team. Whilst these students were only playing for their school, as opposed to an actual team, that would soon change.
This academy helped produce some of the nation’s most talented entrepreneurs, artists and athletes, and in 1920, four of these graduates came together to help repay their school. Ricardo Ornelas, a journalist, David Ferreira, a historian, Mario Silva, Portugal’s first Olympic swimmer, and Cândido de Oliveira, a footballer, joined together to found Casa Pia Atlético Clube in honor of the children’s charity.
After just a few months, Casa Pia were already winning regional trophies and participating in tournaments in France and Spain. The Gansos, or Geese, won the Lisbon Championship on three different occasions in their first four years of existence, and they also entered the inaugural editions of the National Championship and Taça de Portugal in 1938/39, only to finish bottom of the table.
One year later, Casa Pia’s stadium Campo do Restelo was expropriated by the Estado Novo for the exhibition of the Portuguese world. António de Oliveira Salazar’s fascist regime ordered Casa Pia to to vacate their home ground as it was in the same area that the government was going to use as an exposition to spread propaganda to the rest of the nation and honor their colonial empire. Just like many of the people who founded the club, Casa Pia were suddenly orphans, in need of a new stadium to feature their matches.
They wandered from place to place before finally settling at the Estádio Pina Manique in 1954. However, this didn’t quite result in a resurgence; instead, the Portuguese federation’s decision to move to a two-tier professional system with promotion and relegation would see them languish into obscurity. Unable to handle the newfound competition from richer sides, and deprived of many of their fans following their move to a new area, Casa Pia dropped into the lower leagues and stayed there for the following half-century.
Eventually, however, Casa Pia managed to work their way back to the spotlight. In 2010, Casa Pia finished atop the Portuguese fourth tier, and in 2019, they made their way to the Portuguese second division. However, trouble would soon be around the corner: Casa Pia finished bottom of the second tier, and with the COVID-19 pandemic rearing its ugly head, the Gansos found themselves in grave danger of collapse.
Instead, they were saved by the bell: Vitória de Setúbal and Aves were relegated from the top-flight to the third division after failing to provide valid licensing documentation to compete in the professional leagues, and as such, both Casa Pia and Cova da Piedade stayed afloat in the second tier. That same year, American investor Robert Platek decided to acquire the club and appoint Miguel Lopes as CEO.
Bit by bit, the two started to rebuild the team from scratch and use data and technology to improve their player recruitment. They finished ninth in the 2020/21 campaign, and the following year, they finished second to achieve promotion to the Primeira Liga. For the first time in 83 years, Casa Pia were going to be playing in Portugal’s top-flight.
With their improved budget, Casa Pia were able to set a long-term goal of refurbishing the Estádio Pina Manique in order to meet the league’s minimum requirements. During their first year back in the top-flight, Casa Pia were forced to play at the Estádio Dr. Magalhães Pessoa in Leiria, more than an hour north of Lisbon, and Estádio Nacional, typically used to host cup finals.
Despite these uniquely challenging circumstances, Casa Pia managed to punch above their weight and even found themselves in the top five, only to regress to the mean and eventually finish 10th in the table whilst also reaching the quarterfinals of the Taça de Portugal. The following season, Casa Pia switched to the cheaper Estádio Municipal de Rio Maior, whose previous football club folded in 2010.
It proved to be a turbulent campaign: after six matches without a win, manager Filipe Martins resigned after a legendary three-year spell with the Geese. Pedro Moreira took charge on November 20, 2023 with the club in 15th place, but he struggled to turn things around and was eventually sacked on February 15 after three wins, two draws and six defeats. Gonçalo Santos took charge with the club 16th in the table, and he managed to avoid the threat of relegation and lead them to a ninth-place finish.
Santos would depart in the summer and reunite with his former boss Marco Silva at Fulham, with the club turning to João Pereira. Many were skeptical of the 32-year-old Pereira, whose sole managerial experience had come with lower-league sides Amora and Alverca, and this dubiousness only grew after Casa Pia failed to score in each of their first three matches of the campaign, losing to Boavista, Benfica and Santa Clara.
Since then, however, Casa Pia have lost just twice — to Porto and Sporting — whilst they’ve managed to climb to seventh in the Primeira Liga table after closing out the year with three consecutive victories against Estoril, Arouca and Braga. One player who has proven vital in the club’s renaissance is Nuno Moreira, who joined from Vizela in January 2024.
“Casa Pia was the team that registered the most interest in signing me and that believed in my potential and style of play, so I thought that this was the team where I could go further in my development and take the next step,” said Moreira in an RG interview. “I wanted to improve as a player and be able to go to the next level. I felt I was going to be important for them and that I’d improve more at Casa Pia than at Vizela.”
“I think this is undoubtedly the best moment of my career. It has everything to do with the confidence I’m feeling at the moment and the team’s importance, the way that the ball reaches me, but mainly, what changed was me and the confidence I have in myself that perhaps I didn’t have in other seasons.”
Having scored 7 goals and 10 assists across 101 appearances in the first three seasons of his senior career, Moreira has already racked up 7 goals and 5 assists in 17 appearances this season. He’s ended 2024 in stellar fashion, grabbing two assists vs. Arouca and the winning goal vs. Braga, and he’s also played a vital run in their cup campaign. After grabbing a hat-trick vs. Amora and a goal vs. Chaves, Moreira has spearheaded the Gansos to the Round of 16 of the Taça de Portugal, where they will face Rio Ave on January 16.
Over the first half of this decade, Casa Pia have been able to punch above their weight and ascend the Portuguese footballing pyramid thanks to their shrewd player trading model. From Jota Silva (now at Nottingham Forest) to Clayton, from Saviour Godwin to Felippe Cardoso, Casa Pia have been able to develop raw, young prospects and mold them into impressive players before selling them for lucrative fees. At 25, there’s reason to believe that Moreira could be the next player to leave Casa Pia for a mouth-watering price.
By: Zach Lowy / @ZachLowy
Featured Image: @GabFoligno / Carlos Rodrigues / Getty Images