| Personal information | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Full name | João Baptista Martins | ||
| Date of birth | 3 September 1927 | ||
| Place of birth | Sines, Portugal | ||
| Date of death | 18 November 1993 (aged 66) | ||
| Place of death | Portugal | ||
| Playing position | Midfielder | ||
| Youth career | |||
| CUF Barreiro | |||
| Senior career* | |||
| Years | Team | Apps | (Gls) |
| 1947–1959 | Sporting CP | 204 | (133) |
| * Senior club appearances and goals counted for the domestic league only | |||
João Baptista Martins (3 September 1927 – 18 November 1993) was a Portuguese footballer who played as a midfielder for CUF Barreiro and Sporting CP.
Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic, is a country located mostly on the Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe. It is the westernmost sovereign state of mainland Europe, being bordered to the west and south by the Atlantic Ocean and to the north and east by Spain. Its territory also includes the Atlantic archipelagos of the Azores and Madeira, both autonomous regions with their own regional governments.
Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played with a spherical ball between two teams of eleven players. It is played by 250 million players in over 200 countries and dependencies, making it the world's most popular sport. The game is played on a rectangular field called a pitch with a goal at each end. The object of the game is to score by moving the ball beyond the goal line into the opposing goal.
A midfielder is an association football position. Midfielders are generally positioned on the field between their team's defenders and forwards. Some midfielders play a disciplined defensive role, breaking up attacks, and are otherwise known as defensive midfielders. Others blur the boundaries, being more mobile and efficient in passing: they are commonly referred to as deep-lying midfielders, play-makers, box-to-box, or holding midfielders. The number of midfielders on a team and their assigned roles depends on the team's formation; the collective group of these players on the field is sometimes referred to as the midfield.
In 1955, he scored the first goal in the history of the European Cup (now UEFA Champions League). It was on 4 September, the first day of the first edition of the tournament. Sporting played FK Partizan, from Yugoslavia, at the Estádio Nacional in Lisbon. Martins scored the opening goal of the match in the 14th minute; the game ended in a 3–3 draw. [1]
The UEFA Champions League is an annual club football competition organised by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) and contested by top-division European clubs. It is one of the most prestigious tournaments in the world and the most prestigious club competition in European football, played by the national league champions of the strongest UEFA national associations.
Fudbalski klub Partizan, commonly known as Partizan Belgrade or simply Partizan, is a Serbian professional football club based in Belgrade. It forms a major part of the Partizan multi-sport club. The club plays in the Serbian SuperLiga and has spent its entire history in the top tier of Yugoslav and Serbian football having won a total of 45 official trophies: 27 national championships, 15 national cups, 1 national supercup, 1 Mitropa Cup, 1 Uhrencup finishing in the Yugoslav league all-time table as second.
Yugoslavia was a country in Southeastern and Central Europe for most of the 20th century. It came into existence after World War I in 1918 under the name of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by the merger of the provisional State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs with the Kingdom of Serbia, and constituted the first union of the South Slavic people as a sovereign state, following centuries in which the region had been part of the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary. Peter I of Serbia was its first sovereign. The kingdom gained international recognition on 13 July 1922 at the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris. The official name of the state was changed to Kingdom of Yugoslavia on 3 October 1929.
