Sunday the twentieth of September, 2026, at the Estádio Do Dragão, with Porto as the home side on the record and the score reading 3-1. Home side first — that is a one-three away defeat for Benfica, and four days later it is the freshest and sorest thing on the page.
Read the line properly before you feel it. Three-one to the hosts is a two-goal margin, the sort of away defeat that can be a thriller or a procession and the score alone will not say which. What it does say: Benfica scored, at a ground where the record's previous two visits brought a four-one win and a nil-nil draw, and it still ended with nothing.
Because before Sunday, this stretch of the record was absurd. The seventeenth of August: away to Casa Pia, and the record reads 0-7. Home side first, so that is seven-nil to Benfica on the road, the biggest scoreline anywhere on this page. The thirty-first of August: two-one over Estoril at home. Then two more away days — three-nil at Marítimo on the fifth of September, four-nil at Moreirense on the ninth — and then the thirteenth, three-one over Gil Vicente at the Estádio da Luz. Five league afternoons in sequence, five wins, nineteen scored and two conceded. The shape of the run is unmistakable.
Seven-nil away deserves its own footnote even in the middle of a run of wins. Whatever the game actually looked like — and the row will not say — the column that day reads 0-7 with the home side first, which is about as emphatic a line as one team can leave in another team's record. Nobody plans a seven; they just happen to teams that keep playing.
Then the week that ends the piece. Wednesday the sixteenth, away to AC Milan in the UEFA Europa League, the line reading 0-2 — Milan nil, Benfica two, a clean away win in one of the biggest fixtures this club has in the data. Four days later, the Estádio Do Dragão and the one-three. That is football compressed into five days: a European win away, then a league defeat away, and not much in between except travel.
The Porto thread in this record runs longer and has been kinder than Sunday suggests. The tenth of November, 2024: four-one at home, at the Estádio do Sport Lisboa e Benfica. The sixth of April, 2025: four-one away — at this same Estádio Do Dragão, with the line that day reading 1-4. The fifth of October, 2025: nil-nil there. The eighth of March, 2026: two-two at home. Across five meetings the head-to-head reads two wins, two draws and one defeat, eleven scored and seven conceded — and until Sunday that thread had no defeats in it at all.
The league line underneath all of that is in the numbers block below, and it is the kind most clubs would frame. One league afternoon to argue about; a week that took in Milan and the Dragão; and a run of away scorelines — seven-nil, three-nil, four-nil, two-nil — that says how the travelling has been going. The Sunday stung because of the fixture and the margin, not the shape of the season.
By the numbers — Liga Portugal: 2nd · 7 played · 5–1–1 · 22–7 · 16 pts · form WWWWL (most recent last). All data from ScoreCrowd's match records, retrieved 24 September 2026.