A group of friends decided to set up a new netball club in Portugal. We have played netball separately earlier in our lives and more recently, together in Portugal. Setting up a club was going to be a whole new challenge.
Having moved from elsewhere in the world, we love living in Portugal. We love the food, the people and of course, the glorious weather. Like many places in the world though, the Portuguese bureaucracy LOVES paperwork. If you’ve lived here for a while, you soon come to learn that you must take ALL your paperwork with you, when applying for anything. Living in Portugal you come to appreciate the laid back, relaxed lifestyle… It may even be one of your reasons for choosing to move here… You also come to understand that timeframes don’t necessarily work the same here as they do elsewhere. “It will be ready in two weeks” is just a VERY rough guideline.
There are a few stages to setting up a sports club, called an Association, here in Portugal. Firstly we enlisted the help of a lawyer, who has proven to be unbelievably helpful and we honestly couldn’t have got this far without him. First we had to produce all our IDs and the accompanying registration paperwork (address, tax numbers etc). Then we submitted 3 options for our club name, which came with their own long list of dos and don’ts. Then we waited… and waited. Until finally, we received confirmation that our chosen name ‘Rockets Netball’ had been accepted!
We ordered posts, balls and bibs directly from Net World Sports and started talking to other ladies who wanted to play netball.
We started the registration to legalise the club itself, open a bank account etc. Until that time, we were playing as a group of ladies who love netball.
In October 2023 we became a legal ‘associação’ !
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