2003–04 Sporting CP season
season of football team
The 2003–04 season was Sporting CP's 97th season in existence and 70th consecutive season in the top flight of Portuguese football.
Season overview
The club had a disappointing season in the wake of teenage starlet Cristiano Ronaldo's transfer to Manchester United and Mario Jardel's transfer to Bolton Wanderers in August 2003.
Sporting began the season with a 2-1 away victory over Academica Coimbra, thanks to a last minute winning goal from Beto. Sporting then had irregular form for the next 6 matchdays, but then went on an 18-match unbeaten run. Sporting's form started to decline towards the end of the season, starting with a heavy 4-0 loss to Rio Ave on 27 March 2004. Sporting won their next three matches after that to bounce back from the heavy loss, but then lost matches to Boavista, União Leiria, and then lost the Lisbon derby to Benfica thanks to a late goal by Geovanni in the penultimate round of the season, which ended their hopes of qualifying to the Champions League the following season.
In the Portuguese Cup, the club was eliminated in the fifth round, by Vitoria Guimaraes, after entering in the fourth round. In the UEFA Cup, the club was eliminated at home in the second round with three goals in less than ten minutes by Turkish club Gençlerbirliği after having drawn the first leg.
“2003–04 Sporting CP season” enters the record as season of football team. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sporting, season and football can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16850632. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2003 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “2003–04 Sporting CP season” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.