Boca Juniors

Club Atlético Boca Juniors is an Argentine sports institution based in the La Boca neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. It was founded in that neighbourhood on 3 April 1905 by six teenage neighbours, sons of Italians. Football is its most prominent discipline, although it also competes at professional level, nationally and internationally, in basketball, volleyball, futsal and women's football, while sports such as boxing, judo, karate, taekwondo, rhythmic gymnastics and artistic gymnastics are practised at amateur level. It currently plays in the Superliga Argentina.

Boca Juniors has taken part in the top-flight football division since 1913 and, from the 2013 Torneo Inicial, became the only club to have played every season in the Primera División since the start of professionalism in 1931. It is also the team with the most matches played. From 8 June 2015, Boca Juniors broke the record for the longest uninterrupted stay in the Primera División, with 37,312 days. The team plays its home matches at the Alberto J. Armando stadium, known worldwide as "La Bombonera".

Domestically, the club has 34 Primera División league championships and 13 national cups (an Argentine record), among which three editions of the Copa Argentina stand out (record winner of the competition: 1969, 2011-12 and 2014-15) and the 2018 Supercopa Argentina. It also holds an honorary title from the amateur era: the Copa de Honor, obtained in 1925, a recognition by the AFA of its successful tour of Europe that year.

Internationally, it is the second club with the most official titles in the world (22), among which it holds 18 at confederation and inter-confederation level (FIFA and Conmebol) and 4 Río de la Plata cups (AFA-AUF); and it is the club with the most official international titles in all of the Americas. It is also the joint record champion of the Intercontinental Cup (3) worldwide, together with Peñarol, Nacional, Milan and Real Madrid. In addition, it is the club in the Americas with the most finals of international confederation cups, with 28 (3rd worldwide, behind Real Madrid's 39 and Milan's 33). It is also the record holder for Copa Libertadores de América finals: 11, and the second club with the most Libertadores titles, with six, behind Independiente, which has seven.

Adding national and international tournaments together, it is the most successful club and the one with the most titles in the history of Argentine football: 69 official titles, which makes it the country's most decorated club. It is also one of the most successful teams in the professional era, and in the amateur era as well, surpassed only by the defunct Alumni and by Racing Club. It is also the only club in the country to have won at least one title in every decade and one of the two Argentine teams (together with Racing) that have most often won the championship undefeated: 5 times (in 1919, 1924, 1926, 1998 and 2011). At the same time, it was the second Argentine club (after Racing) to win four official titles in a single year, by being proclaimed champion of the Argentine Primera División, the Copa Dr. Carlos Ibarguren, the Copa de Competencia Jockey Club and the Cup Tie Competition, all in 1919 (these were, precisely, the first four championships won in the club's history).

Its greatest sporting achievements came in 1977, 2000 and 2003, when it was crowned Intercontinental Cup champion by defeating the representatives of the European Champion Clubs' Cup: Borussia Mönchengladbach of Germany, Real Madrid of Spain and Milan of Italy respectively. Thanks to these conquests it belongs to the select group of only 29 teams in the world that have won the highest club football championship at world level, among more than 300,000 clubs recognised by FIFA.

It is considered one of the so-called five big clubs of Argentine football, from the time the AFA introduced the so-called "proportional vote" in 1937, which consisted of giving greater decision-making power to those clubs with the largest number of members, greater seniority and greater number of titles. It is also the only one of the five big clubs that has never been relegated from the Primera División, and the only one that has never finished bottom or played a promotion play-off to keep its place in the division.

Together with River Plate it plays the so-called Superclásico of Argentine football (in which it leads the head-to-head record), an event that, according to the English newspaper The Observer, ranks first among the 50 sporting events to see before you die, while the also British The Sun describes it as the "most intense sporting experience in the world". Likewise, according to various surveys, it is the most popular club in Argentina (40.4%) and the fifth with the most supporters worldwide. For this reason, its fans proclaim themselves "La Mitad Más Uno" ("The Half Plus One"). In addition, it is the sports institution with the most members in Argentina, and in all of Latin America, with 206,078 members in 2018.

Boca Juniors has received several honours for its football performance. The IFFHS distinguished it in its all-time World Club Ranking as the best club in South America of the 21st century. It was also chosen "the most legendary club in the history of the Americas" by the prestigious German magazine Kicker, which placed it eighth worldwide, the only institution on the continent in the top ten. In addition, it is considered by the English magazine FourFourTwo to be "the most iconic football club in the world".