Emelec

Club Sport Emelec, popularly known in short as Emelec, is an Ecuadorian multi-sport club. Originating in the city of Guayaquil, it was founded on 28 April 1929 by the American George Capwell. In addition to its main discipline of football, the club has various sporting branches such as weightlifting, swimming, baseball, basketball, bodybuilding, boxing, taekwondo, judo, cycling, table tennis, volleyball, softball, bowling, esports and women's football.

The club was founded to promote the development of baseball in Guayaquil; however, football quickly became popular and became its main sporting discipline. In its early years it won two “unofficial” championships, two “Campeonato Amateur de Guayaquil” titles and five “Campeonatos de Guayaquil”. Since the creation of the national football championship in 1957 it has belonged to the Serie A of Ecuador, in which it was national champion consecutively in each decade and became the first national champion; in the 1965 season it was champion unbeaten; since its creation it has won fourteen national titles, and C. S. Emelec has been on the podium on thirty occasions, which means almost half of the championships contested.

It was the first Ecuadorian football team to take part in an international championship, the 1948 “Copa de Campeones” (predecessor of the Copa Libertadores de América); in the Copa Libertadores its best performance came in 1995, when it reached the semi-finals; it was runner-up in the now-defunct Copa Merconorte in 2001. As for performance according to the IFFHS ranking, Emelec was the best club in the world for the month of June 2010; between 2011 and 2020 it was ranked 14th in South America and 48th among the clubs of the world.

The football team of Club Sport Emelec plays at home in the Estadio George Capwell, which was inaugurated on 21 October 1945. The stadium has undergone several reductions and expansions; in the latest reconstruction, carried out in 2017, it reached a maximum capacity of forty thousand spectators. Identified with the colours blue and grey, it is given the nickname “eléctricos” (the electrics) because it bears the name of a former electricity company. The blue team maintains a historic footballing rivalry with the Guayaquil team Barcelona, with whom it contests the so-called clásico del Astillero, considered by the sports press to be the most important match in Ecuadorian football.