In our Erasmus+ project “Football Makes History: Schools and Football Club Museums Unlocking Local Heritage education”, we worked with football clubs, schools and heritage stakeholders. One of the missions aimed to find out how football clubs can be(come) educational spaces. In the last leg of our project, we invite new clubs to connect with our platform. We want to learn more about how they organise their heritage work, which values drive that work and where the possibilities are to develop this work further. The mode was to collaborate with these clubs on one of their ongoing activities, share the insights from our project, and listen and learn where the needs and opportunities for further collaboration lies.
One of the clubs with which we connected on such an activity was SL Benfica. On 29th March, this club’s renowned cultural heritage department launched a special publication about the history of women in its club’s past, with an eye to create more inclusive spaces for the cultural heritage work of the club. This work relates strongly to several key practices identified in the Football Makes History Gameplan – a toolkit for football clubs to strengthen their heritage work. In this article, we reflect on the work of this department and zoom in on the publication and its launch event!
The professional approach
Sport Lisboa e Benfica’s cultural heritage is managed by a dedicated interdisciplinary team of professionals that oversees the Museu Benfica – Cosme Damião, the Documentation Centre and the Cultural Storage Department.
The Museum, which has welcomed over 1,000,000 visitors in 11 years, focuses on education, accessibility, and sustainability. It engages the public through non-formal education and uses sports as a tool for learning.
Benfica’s cultural heritage also promotes ethical competition and fair play, collaborating with universities for training and internships.
By connecting the club’s history with broader historical contexts, it provides insights into Portuguese and European society, highlighting the social and cultural significance of sports.
Opening up women’s football history
Women’s football at Sport Lisboa e Benfica has developed at a remarkable rate. Testimony to this is the support it has received from the fans, the many titles it has won and its ability to set an example for all the young women in the country.
Being able to study this path and understand its genesis was the main objective of this publication. We went to the root of the game in order to understand its development and build foundations for the future. It was a lengthy piece of research, supported by internal and external sources and which, given the few studies that have already been carried out, worked a lot on primary sources and sought to outline a rigorous context.
Throughout its history, Benfica has had a great affection for women’s sport and is today an example of a true national commitment to the development of women’s sport. It has dozens of women’s teams, in the most diverse disciplines and levels, and continues to forge a path based on the club’s values and an incessant idea of development.
The ‘O Jogo Delas’ conference was a time for sharing experiences, but also an opportunity for the audience to realise all the difficulties that have been experienced in building the sport in Portugal and the road still to be travelled.
A new historical research publication was presented on 29th March 2025 and received with great enthusiasm by those attending, as it gives substance to many of the ideas put forward at the conference and helps to create context about the sport’s past.
Serving community with heritage
Our plans for the future are quite clear: to continue studying the sport phenomenon and its relationship with the country and society. We intend to publish new papers, continue our work of observation, research and construction of historical landscapes that can contribute to improving our perception of Sport Lisboa e Benfica as a sporting, social and cultural phenomenon.
Thinking Points
There is no model on how to organise the work on cultural heritage in and around football clubs. The example of SL Benfica offers other professional clubs a way ahead. Educators working with young people could reflect on this example by posing and researching the following questions:
- Which aspects are important in the heritage work of football clubs?
- How can such work create new value (beyond ‘just’ sport and commerce?)
Find out more
Check out the new publication online (in Portuguese) on the SL Benfica Heritage Section. Explore the heritage work of SL Benfica Cultural Heritage, or dive into the rich history of this club on a Europeana.
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