Stadiums gone and missed: Estádio Municipal Mário Duarte | OneFootball

Portuguese football is full of iconic landmarks and places that hold memories and traces of the nation’s footballing identity. Some of those grounds were destroyed altogether, while others ended up being reshaped to be adapted into more modern times.

In the first of a series of articles on venues that are no longer with us, we start this journey by travelling to the Portuguese Venice, Aveiro, to recall how popular and beloved the old Mário Duarte ground, home of Beira-Mar for more than seven decades, was to every football supporter.

Stadium switch the death knell to top-flight status

One of the main reasons why Aveiro, one of Portugal’s biggest and most vibrant cities, hasn’t had a first division football club for a while is that the Mário Duarte is no more. The memorable ground that sat on the south side of town was eventually demolished in the summer of 2020 to give way to the expansion of the local hospital, leaving behind decades of sad and joyous moments for the local football supporters. It had been long since abandoned by the local football club, Beira-Mar, who decided it was better to move to the more state-of-the-art ground built for the Euro 2004 on the outskirts of town. A decision that probably cost them a place among the big clubs in Portugal for almost two decades now.

The old Mário Duarte was inaugurated in 1935, at a time when clubs in Portugal were finally settling in as the league was about to kick-start, and the regional tournaments would soon give way to the national competitions that would dominate the football calendar from the 1940s onwards. Aveiro was a town especially focused on the canning and fishing industries, and the game grew in popularity quite quickly.

Local sporting hero

Photo: Miguel Lacerdo (http://www.av.it.pt/aveirocidade/pt/estadio/estadioantigo.htm)

The stadium got its name from one of the most notorious sportsmen of the time, born in the neighbouring town of Anadia. Mário Duarte was known for having won competitions in several different sports. He was a popular ace in cycling, tennis, rowing, swimming, horse riding, fencing and football and was also behind the establishment of the Aveiro Football Federation, after having worked as secretary for the Lisbon Federation for a while. He would later be named chair of the Portuguese Football Federation congress, and when the first football ground in Aveiro was inaugurated in 1935, it was obvious that it would be named after him. Duarte died four years later, but the ground survived him for more than seventy years.

During that time, it became the home of Beira-Mar, which was founded in the early 1920s. For the first four decades of its life, the team was a regular in the second and third tiers of Portuguese football, after dominating the regional championships from its inception. First promoted to the Portuguese top flight in 1961, the experience lasted only a season, but it was the first time the Mário Duarte, known now by the locals as “O Velhinho” (The Old Man), hosted the likes of Benfica, Sporting and Porto.

The club went back up a couple of seasons more in the 1960s at a time when the concrete stands were finally completed, giving the stadium its famous square shape with two central covered stands. The highest moments in the history of the ground were yet to come, though.

Eusébio signs!

In 1976, as Beira-Mar had now been a well-established first division side for a few years, the club performed one of the greatest coups in the history of the game by signing Eusébio, who had just come from the NASL league and had ended his football relationship with the club of his life, Benfica. Every match weekend the Mario Duarte was fully packed so that the locals could enjoy the last competitive matches of one of the greatest players of all time. Wearing the famous yellow shirt with black Adidas stripes, Eusebio was already a victim of several longstanding injuries that didn’t allow him to prevent the club from being relegated.

Although there was a legend about him refusing to play against Benfica, the truth is that the locals held the Eagles to a 2-2 draw in January of 1977, and Eusébio was one of the most threatening players on the pitch. He would score the final goal of his career in Portugal weeks later, again at the Mario Duarte, against his favourite rival, none other than Sporting.

Club legend António Sousa

Alongside him was António Sousa, one of the greatest ever players to wear the club shirt and an important part of the club’s history. Sousa helped Beira-Mar to get back to the top league, now with Eusébio gone, but then in 1979 he ended up being sold to FC Porto. For the Dragons, he became a legend of his own during the following decade, albeit a short spell playing for Sporting, and was a key member of the European Cup-winning side in 1987 and the European Supercup and International Cup won the following season, scoring against Ajax a decisive goal that allowed Porto to reclaim the trophy.

In 1989, a decade after moving from Aveiro, Sousa returned home as Beira-Mar came back to the top league, helping them to reach their first ever cup final, lost against his former club at Jamor. A side that included the likes of Dino, Abdel-Ghany and Penteado coached by Vitor Urbano, who also helped to reestablish the Mario Duarte as one of the toughest away trips for any team in the league. A sixth-place finish in the 1990/91 season was their best position to date. Throughout the nineties, Beira-Mar once again became a first division regular, but the best was yet to come.

Portuguese Cup glory and European football

In 1998/99, now with António Sousa as club manager and his son, Ricardo Sousa, loaned by Porto, alongside the promising young striker Fary Faye in the attacking line, Beira-Mar once again returned to the Jamor to play a Cup final after beating Vitória FC at home. That semi-final played at the Mário Duarte became one of the most iconic matches ever to be hosted in the old ground and was just the appetiser for what was to come. A Sousa goal allowed Beira-Mar to claim the Cup, against Campomaiorense, their first-ever major trophy. That also came with a ticket to Europe, although the side were beaten by Vitesse in the UEFA Cup first round.

The worst possible news was that the club had been relegated that same season, and even if they quickly rose back, things were starting to look grim. The club had by then decided to move to the more modern Municipal de Aveiro, inaugurated for the Euro 2004, not in time for the ground to enjoy the short-lived stint of Mário Jardel, one of the greatest goal scorers in the history of Portuguese football, who signed for Beira-Mar after leaving Sporting.

The move to the Municipal de Aveiro was, in the long run, terrible for the club, which experienced ups and downs over the following decade until bankruptcy in 2005 had them demoted to the Aveiro district league, where they played for several seasons before getting promotion to the Campeonato de Portugal, the country’s fourth tier.

Photo: Miguel Lacerdo (http://www.av.it.pt/aveirocidade/pt/estadio/estadioantigo.htm)

Brief rebirth

By then the Mário Duarte had been left for dead, completely abandoned by both the club and the city hall, which owned the land. It was the action of a group of Beira-Mar supporters, who volunteered to clean up the place so that the youth setups could once again play near Aveiro’s downtown, that briefly brought life back to the old stadium. The project was so successful that eventually even Beira-Mar’s first team returned home for a couple of seasons, increasing attendances as they were promoted from the fifth to the fourth tier.

It wouldn’t last, though. The city hall had by then decided the land where the ground was built would serve the city better if the expansion works of the city’s hospital were set there, and Beira-Mar saw itself forced to return to the giant yet soulless Municipal ground. In June 2020, the demolition works began, but not before supporters were granted one last visit to take home anything that would remind them of the old ground forever.

The Mário Duarte was, by then, one of the oldest stadiums in Portuguese football and its turf had seen countless of feats by the local club against the Big Three as well as heartbreaking and tense matches to avoid relegation and electric afternoons that celebrated promotions and qualifications for two cup finals. A piece of the soul of Aveiro, a town now much more focused on its academic and technological newfound identity, was lost forever.