Real Betis
The club
Real Betis Balompié are one of the two great clubs of Seville, in Andalusia, southern Spain. They are not Real Madrid and they are not Real Sociedad, both entirely separate clubs; nor are they Sevilla FC, their city rivals from across town, against whom they contest the Seville derby. The club traces its official foundation to September 1907, when students of the local Polytechnic Academy formed a balompié club — "balompié" being the literal Spanish rendering of "football", as against the anglicised "fútbol" — recognised officially in 1909 as Sevilla Balompié. In 1914 they merged with Betis Football Club, itself born of a split from Sevilla FC, received royal patronage the same year, and became Real Betis Balompié. During the Second Republic, when royal patronage was nullified, they were plain Betis Balompié, reverting to the full name after the Civil War.
The colours are green and white vertical stripes. The club originally played in all blue, but founder and captain Manuel Ramos Asensio, who had studied in Scotland, contacted Celtic — whose green and white matched the Andalusian regional flag — and obtained the same fabric Celtic used, choosing vertical stripes because no Spanish club then wore the combination. The club acknowledged the Celtic link officially in 2017 with a special hooped kit for Andalusia Day. Nicknames include El Glorioso and Heliopolitanos, and the supporters are Béticos. The motto, born of a tumultuous history of relegations, is "¡Viva el Betis manque pierda!" — long live Betis even when they lose.
The traditional home is the Estadio Benito Villamarín, bought by the club in 1961 and named after a former president, but since 2025 Betis have played at the 70,000-seat Estadio La Cartuja while a 262 million euro redevelopment of the Villamarín is completed. The president is Ángel Haro and the head coach is the Chilean Manuel Pellegrini, in charge since July 2020 and now in his club-record run of consecutive European qualifications; 2026-27 is the club's 120th season and Pellegrini's seventh.
Recent seasons
Betis finished fifth in La Liga in 2021-22 with 65 points, a season crowned by the Copa del Rey. They were sixth in 2022-23 with 60 points and seventh in 2023-24 with 57. In 2024-25 they finished sixth on 60 points, with Isco their top scorer on nine league goals and twelve in all competitions, and reached the Conference League final. In 2025-26 they finished fifth with 60 points from 38 matches, fifteen wins, fifteen draws and eight defeats, 59 scored and 48 conceded, Cucho Hernández leading the way with eleven league goals and fifteen in all — a finish that returned Betis to the Champions League for the first time in 21 years.
Honours and landmarks
Betis won La Liga once, on 28 April 1935 under the Irish coach Patrick O'Connell, topping the table by a single point over Madrid FC — to date their only top-division title. The championship team was dismantled by the club's poor finances and the arrival of the Civil War; fifteen months after the title only two of the winners, Peral and Saro, were left, and exactly five years after winning the league the club was relegated.
The Copa del Rey has been won three times. The first, on 25 June 1977 at the Vicente Calderón, finished 2-2 against Athletic Bilbao and was settled 8-7 on penalties after a staggering 21 kicks. The second came on 11 June 2005, 2-1 against Osasuna through an extra-time winner from the youth graduate Dani. The third was in 2022, 5-4 on penalties against Valencia after a 1-1 draw. There were also final defeats in 1931 (3-1 to Athletic Bilbao in the first Copa del Presidente de la República final Betis reached) and 1997 (3-2 after extra time to Barcelona at the Santiago Bernabéu).
The first Segunda División title, in 1932, made Betis the first Andalusian club to play in La Liga; the season-by-season record read here lists second-tier titles in 1931-32, 1941-42, 1957-58, 1970-71, 1973-74, 2010-11 and 2014-15. The darkest period came in 1947 with relegation to the Tercera División, where ten years of enormous travelling support earned the fans the name of the Green March; on returning to the second level in 1954 Betis became the only club in Spain to have won the titles of all three major divisions. In 2005-06 they became the first Andalusian team to play in the Champions League, and in 2025 they reached their first European final, losing the Conference League final to Chelsea.
Notable scorelines
The 1977 cup final's 21-penalty shootout stands as a landmark in itself. In recent seasons the club's biggest win recorded here is 6-1 away to Gévora in the 2024-25 Copa del Rey, and the biggest defeats are 5-1 away to Barcelona in the same league season and 5-0 at home to Atlético Madrid in the 2025-26 Copa del Rey quarter-final. In Europe the widest recent margin is the 6-2 aggregate over Vitória de Guimarães in the 2024-25 Conference League round of sixteen, including a 4-0 win in Guimarães; the heaviest European defeat read here is the 4-1 loss to Chelsea in the 2025 Conference League final. Early in 2026-27 Betis lost 5-2 away to Levante. The club's all-time record victory and record defeat were not established from the sources read here.
European record
Betis first made a mark in Europe after the 1977 cup win, entering the Cup Winners' Cup, knocking out AC Milan 3-2 on aggregate in the first round and reaching the quarter-finals, where they lost to Dynamo Moscow. In the 1995-96 UEFA Cup they beat Fenerbahçe 4-1 on aggregate and Kaiserslautern 4-1 before losing 3-2 to Bordeaux, that year's beaten finalists, and under Luis Aragonés they reached the Cup Winners' Cup quarter-finals again in 1997-98. The sole Champions League campaign before now was 2005-06: Monaco were beaten 3-2 on aggregate in the final qualifying round, and despite a 1-0 home win over Chelsea, Betis finished third in Group G and dropped into the UEFA Cup, going out in the round of sixteen to Steaua Bucharest after a 3-0 home defeat. Across their European history the record read here is 121 matches, 59 wins, 27 draws and 35 defeats, 172 goals for and 124 against.
The 2024-25 Conference League was the deepest run of all. Betis finished fifteenth in the 36-team league phase, then beat Gent 3-1 on aggregate in the knockout play-offs — winning the first leg 3-0 in Ghent — and Vitória de Guimarães 6-2 in the round of sixteen, drawing 2-2 at home before the 4-0 away win with Cédric Bakambu scoring twice. Jagiellonia Białystok were beaten 3-1 in the quarter-finals, 2-0 at home and 1-1 away, and Fiorentina 4-3 on aggregate in the semi-finals, 2-1 at the Benito Villamarín and 2-2 after extra time in Florence, Antony and Abde Ezzalzouli scoring in the second leg. In the final at the Wrocław Stadium on 28 May 2025, in front of 39,754 with Irfan Peljto of Bosnia and Herzegovina refereeing, Ezzalzouli put Betis ahead on nine minutes, but Chelsea scored four in the second half through Enzo Fernández, Nicolas Jackson, Jadon Sancho and Moisés Caicedo and won 4-1 — the largest margin in any Conference League final, and the win that made Chelsea the first club to hold all four major European trophies.
In 2025-26 Betis played the Europa League, came through the league phase, beat Panathinaikos 4-1 on aggregate in the round of sixteen and went out 5-3 on aggregate to Braga in the quarter-finals.
Quotes
After the 2025 Conference League final, Manuel Pellegrini said of his players: "They are devastated. We couldn't maintain what we did in the first half." He added: "We were causing them problems through Abde, but he sprained his ankle, and we had to replace him. Still, we should be proud of the way we played, and the rest is football," and, looking at the wider picture: "For Betis, qualifying for Europe and reaching a final is already quite a feat... We have had a really good season - unfortunately we couldn't win this title, but we will start working on the team for next season tomorrow."
Right now (2026-27)
Manuel Pellegrini is the head coach for a twelfth consecutive top-flight campaign for the club, who continue at the Estadio La Cartuja. The summer brought Facundo Bernal from Fluminense, Fran García from Real Madrid, Diego Conde on loan from Villarreal, Troy Parrott from AZ Alkmaar on 20 August and Dani Ceballos from Real Madrid on 1 September; Sergi Altimira left for Sporting CP and Pau López for FC Andorra.
The league start has been strong with one jarring exception. Betis beat Real Sociedad 1-0 at home on 21 August 2026 through Rodrigo Riquelme on 63 minutes, won 1-0 at Valencia on 25 August with an 83rd-minute goal, were beaten 5-2 at Levante on 29 August despite goals from Marc Bartra and Riquelme, and then beat Real Madrid 1-0 at La Cartuja on 4 September 2026, Troy Parrott scoring on 81 minutes in front of 60,046. That leaves them fourth with nine points from four matches.
Betis are in the Champions League league phase for the first time since 2005-06, drawn against Lille, Porto, Feyenoord, Borussia Dortmund, Slovan Bratislava, Como, Arsenal and Bayern Munich. The dates of those fixtures, and the full 2026-27 La Liga table beyond Betis's own position, were not established from the sources read here.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Betis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024%E2%80%9325_Real_Betis_season https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%9326_Real_Betis_season https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026%E2%80%9327_Real_Betis_season https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_UEFA_Conference_League_final https://www.outlookindia.com/sports/football/real-betis-vs-chelsea-conference-league-el-glorioso-devastated-by-final-collapse-says-manuel-pellegrini
Researched and written for not4quarters. Where a fact could not be established from the sources read, this page says so rather than guessing.