S.C. Corinthians Paulista is a football club which plays in Brazil.
History
Football (soccer) had already established itself as the popular new sport in Brazil and when the dry season came and the fields dried out they were soon filled with lovers of the new game. São Paulo's sporting elite had formed several clubs,Germânia, Paulistano and Campos Elíseos among them, but access to the game was still largely restricted to the city's well off.
First members
So a group of working class fans - painter and decorators Joaquim Ambrósio, Antônio Pereira and César Nunes; cobbler Rafael Perrone; driver Anselmo Correia; foundry worker; Alexandre Magnani: cook Salvador Lopomo; labourer João da Silva and tailor Antônio Nunes - decided to start their own team. Bataglia decided to get involved he was named the club's first president.
Name
The new club needed a name. Joaquim Ambrósio suggested they call themselves after the Corinthians Casuals Football Club, the famous English team that was then on tour in Brazil. The press and fans in Brazil who were following the tour shortened the English club's name to Corinthian's Team and so the founders did away with the aopstrophe and the club won its elegant name Corinthians.
Nickames
Corinthians is also known as Big Team, Coringão, The Musketeer and Champion of the Champions.
Colours
Finally, the club picked colours. The club's first strip was beige with black trim and had the distinctive letters "C" and "P" for Corinthians Paulista. However, when the strips were washed, the black bled into the beige. The directors could not afford to keep buying new strips every time the colours ran so they decided to change their colours. They swapped the beige for white. In present-day, the colours of Corinthians are Black and White.
Stadium
The name of Corinthians´s stadium is Arena Corinthians, also known as Itaquerão and with a capacity crowd of 68,000.
1st match
The team from Varzea Paulista. Playing away from home in their first match, Corinthians were expected to lose heavily but they showed they were not there just to make up the numbers and they battled hard before narrowly going down by a goal to nil.
Second match and first win
The defeat turned out to be a one-off. Four days later, Corinthians proved they would be a name to be reckoned with and beat Estrela Polar 2-0. The honour of scoring the club's first goal went to striker Luís Fabi, who wrote himself into the history books by grabbing the opener. They followed the match with an unbeaten streak that lasted two years.
The "big league" They then won 1-0 away at Minas Gerais and then beat São Paulo do Bexiga 4-0 at home. They had secured their place in the big league.
Things got even better the following year and in 1914 a dynasty took hold. In just their second Paulista Championship, Corinthians destroyed the competition and won all 10 games, scoring 39 times in the process. Neco ended the tournament's top goalscorer with 12 goals.
Threepeats
Corinthians picked up yet another Paulista Championship in 1922 but this victory had something special about it. The winner took the title not only of Paulista Champions but also of Centenary Champions, a title they would hold for at least the next 100 years.
By this time, winning the Paulista was becoming routine. The team won the league three years in a row in 1922, 1923 and 1924 under the command of Neco, the club's first great idol, and would do so again in 1928, 1929 and 1930.
Rivalry
The great and only rival of Corinthians is Sociedade Esportiva Palmeiras. This is the most derbie and traditional rivalry in Brazilian football. The fans of Corinthians called Palmeiras as a pig and the fans of palmeiras called Corinthians as a skunk.
Problems
However, and between 1931 and 1934 a series of bad results left the team trailing. Corinthians lost to all their big rivals of the time and failed to make an impression in the league, never finishing higher than fourth.
Solutions
The turnaround came in 1937, and for the rest of the decade there was only one team in the state. Corinthians won the Paulista Championship in 1937, 1938 and 1939 to become the first team ever to win three back-to-back titles three times. Even today, no other team has managed to equal such a feat. The man who led the way was centre-forward Teleco. One of the club's greatest ever goalscorers, he topped the scoring charts in 1937 and 1939. The former year he scored almost half the club's goals, while in the latter he got an amazing 60 percent.