With more than 450,000 inhabitants, Lleida will not have any football team playing in the top four categories of football next season. Smaller towns enjoy professional football and Lleida does not. Atlètic Lleida, the recently created club that has not yet managed to win over fans, will hardly avoid relegation to Tercera RFEF. With four games left, they are eight points from the relegation zone. And Lleida CF, the team that defends the long football tradition of the former Unió Esportiva Lleida, is precisely last in Tercera RFEF. Surely, they will also go down. In a city where basketball thrives, football suffers. But in the stands of the Tercera RFEF grounds, in the darkest moment, many fans have discovered many things. They have found beauty, despite the pain.

Just as Lleida is enjoying a golden era for its basketball, with Hiopos in the First Division making its arena a fortress, football on the mainland is mourning. The demise of Lleida FC, the club that inherited the historic UE Lleida, will be made official in the coming days. A new club was born with the colors and values of the previous one, keeping alive the spirit of that old Lleida that played in the First Division. They have become the means to explain, step by step, the dismantling of the institution with a certain cruelty, since everyone knows that its demise seems inevitable, but even these days fans were encouraged to buy club clothing at a discount. A statement announcing that more serious talks had failed, at which point the workers were told to look for work.

Being a football fan in Lleida has become an act of faith in recent years. In 2011, the historic Unió Esportiva Lleida disappeared, drowned by debt, and in its place was born Lleida Esportiu, heir to that tradition but with a short and eventful life. Now it plays in the Second RFEF, accompanied by a loyal fan base that lives with dismay the club's confrontation with the Paeria, the city council. A series that is talked about in the courts, the municipal plenary sessions and the streets.