In the early weeks of the pandemic, one question dominated the sports bulletins of Portuguese newspapers and TV stations. Why and how had Sporting Lisbon, struggling financially, fourth in the table but 20 points off top spot, paid Braga €10 million to sign their coach Ruben Amorim? Only Andre Villas-Boas and Brendan Rodgers had been signed for a bigger fee across all of Europe.
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It was March 5, 2020, and Amorim was 35 years old. He had only been a top-flight coach for 10 weeks and on top of all of that, Amorim is a die-hard Benfica fan, as well as a former player for Sporting’s city rivals.
If it was a big risk for the club, it was an even bigger one for Amorim himself. He was leaving a stable situation at Braga, where he was still getting settled, and moving to one of the league’s most chaotic clubs. Sporting are known as a “coaches’ cemetery” in Portugal (Amorim was to be their fourth permanent manager in less than two years) and many people close to Amorim urged him not to take it.
Two years on, all those questions have vanished.
These days, nobody would question the lengths Sporting went to to get Amorim. In fact, it looks like one of the best decisions taken by a Portuguese club in recent years.
And Amorim already looks like the best Portuguese manager of his generation.
Tonight (Tuesday), his team host Manchester City in the first leg of a Champions League last-16 tie at the Estadio Jose Alvalade. That alone is a success. This is only the second time in their history that Sporting have reached the knockout stages since the competition was rebranded to the Champions League. And they did so by finishing ahead of Borussia Dortmund in Group C, recording a famous 3-1 win over Erling Haaland and company in Lisbon in November.
Even more important than that is what Amorim has done in domestic football.
As well as winning three Tacas de Liga (the Portuguese equivalent of the League Cup), he delivered the title last season. It was Sporting’s first championship for 19 years. If they retain it this year — they are six points behind Porto after Friday’s 2-2 draw between the two sides in Porto — it would be their first time retaining the league since 1954.
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Speak to those who know Amorim about how he has managed to turn Portuguese football on its head and they all point to one thing: his personality. He has always been charismatic, a natural leader, and someone who team-mates and colleagues wanted to follow.
That was the driving force behind his playing career, when he was a solid, dependable central midfielder who could also fill in at right-back. He was in the Benfica academy as a boy but, having been released, started his professional career at another Lisbon club, Belenenses, where he spent four years in the first team. In 2008, Amorim returned to Benfica — the club of his heart — who were managed at the time by Quique Sanchez Flores.
The next season, when Jorge Jesus replaced the future Watford manager, Benfica won the title. Amorim was part of a remarkable team (David Luiz, Fabio Coentrao, Javi Garcia, Ramires, Pablo Aimar, Angel di Maria, Javier Saviola formed quite the core), although he was never inhibited by training with these more famous and talented players. His leadership and performances earned him a place in the Portugal squad at the 2010 World Cup.
Amorim won two more Portuguese titles with Benfica, started for them in the 2014 Europa League final (a loss to Sevilla on penalties), and played at the 2014 World Cup too. But a bad knee injury ended his playing career in his homeland, and after a brief loan in Qatar, he retired aged just 32.
But even if he was a good player rather than a great one, Amorim left an impression on team-mates. They say that he was the “joker of the dressing room”, always talking, always entertaining them, and getting his ideas across.
It felt inevitable that a player like that would go into coaching and Amorim shone on the High Performance Football Coaching course at the Faculty of Human Kinetics at the University of Lisbon.
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His first job came soon after, at third-tier Casa Pia for the start of the 2018-19 season. Amorim hit the ground running there, impressing with the intensity of his training sessions. But with Casa Pia at the top of their league, Amorim’s work did not go unnoticed, nor did the fact that he was coaching without the required licences to do so. Casa Pia were fined and threatened with a points deduction, Ruben quit, but the team he left behind still won promotion at the end of the season.
The next step after Casa Pia was to take charge of a B team, and there was plenty of interest. Most prominently of all were Benfica, the club Amorim supported and where he enjoyed the best part of his playing career. Many people expected Amorim to take on the job of Benfica B coach from the start of the 2019-20 season. Just six months before Bruno Lage, now coach of Wolves, had been promoted from Benfica B to the first team there. The pathway was clear.
But after meetings with the club, Amorim decided to say no. Benfica have always been a political club, with then-president Luis Filipe Vieira looming over everything there. This job was not as powerful as the one Amorim wanted. He did not want to have to pick anyone else’s players. He wanted to coach the team in his own way, with personal responsibility for their results.
So, in September 2019, Amorim took over Braga’s B team instead. He won seven of his first eight games there. And in December 2019, when Braga sacked first-team coach Ricardo Sa Pinto, with the team stuck in eighth, they turned straight to Amorim, for his first job in top-flight management.
“Here at Braga, Ruben Amorim’s impact was tremendous,” says Paulo Meneses, their head of recruitment. “First on the B team and then on the first team. His personality, the way he works, made us think that we could be in the presence of a top coach.”
The first challenge for any new manager in any job is to convince his players that his ideas are right. This is how the manager generates “buy-in” and how, over time, their own ideas become those of the players too. This skill is maybe the most important in management.
Amorim has it in bucketloads.
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Also important to him is the ability to give clear and simple instructions that make sense to his players. Some coaches might overcomplicate the game but Amorim would rather give simple instructions that are fully understood than complex instructions that are half-grasped.
“Ruben is a coach that brings everyone together,” says Meneses. “From the players, administration, staff, everyone ‘buys into’ your idea. This is key to creating a winning mindset. He has a very strong personality but, at the same time, it does not fracture the group. With his strong leadership, he manages to unite and aggregate. He is very smart in human relationships and communication. These are Ruben’s strengths as a coach.”
Another source who knows Amorim well says the same: “His superpower is not the 3-4-3, it is communication. With the media, the fans and the players.”
Even now, his players at Sporting watch his press conferences intently to see what he has to say.
Ultimately, Amorim lasted even less time as Braga first-team coach than he did in charge of Braga B. He was appointed on December 23, 2019, and left for Sporting on March 4. But even in those 10 weeks, he showed why he was the most exciting young coach in Portugal.
Amorim coached Braga for only nine league games. He won eight of them and drew the other. Under him, Braga beat Porto 2-1 away, Sporting 1-0 at home and Benfica 1-0 away. On top of that, in the Taca de Liga, Braga beat Sporting 2-1 in the semi-finals and Porto 1-0 in the final. Five games against “Big Three” opposition, five wins, all within a four-week period. And Braga’s first trophy in four years to show for it.
Yes, the sample size is small, and yes, many new managers get a bounce when they begin. But this must still be one of the most remarkable short-team improvements any recent managerial appointment has produced.
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So when Sporting sacked Silas, six months into his tenure, they had a decision to make. They could go for another one of the same old names. Or they could take an expensive gamble on the upwardly-mobile Amorim before Benfica or Porto did the same thing. All they had to do was pay the €10 million release clause (£8.4 million in today’s money).
Eyebrows were raised across Portugal when Sporting spent the money, wondering how a club with all their problems could justify such a move.
The answer was emphatic, but not instant.
Amorim’s first game as Sporting coach was a 2-0 home win against Desportivo das Aves, their last game before the enforced COVID-19 stoppage. This was their last game for three months, and some people used that time to ask why the club had spent all this money on a Benfica fan who had only been a top-flight manager for two months.
When football returned in June 2020, Sporting went on a seven-game unbeaten run, pushing up to third, but defeats at Porto and Benfica in their last three games saw them finish fourth. But that spell did give Amorim the chance to try out some of the young players — Nuno Mendes, Joelson Fernandes, Matheus Nunes, Eduardo Quaresma, Tiago Tomas — to see how they would cope. Amorim has always been happy to bet on young players, as long as they believe in his ideas and work hard in training, and that has turned out to be the backbone of his success. And even if some of the players needed convincing about his methods and GPS tracking, Amorim won them round.
The summer that followed also gave Sporting the chance to add more quality: right wing-back Pedro Porro in on loan from Manchester City, former Real Madrid and Real Betis back-up keeper Antonio Adan and former Wolves youngster Pedro Goncalves. One-time West Ham United midfielder Joao Mario joined on loan from Inter Milan a few months into the season.
Even with these new additions, the squad was still not on the level of Porto and Benfica. But it was enough for Amorim to work with. He knew how to bind them all behind his ideas: a rigorously well-organised 3-4-3, which presses high and barely concedes any chances at the back.
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The same leadership and charisma that inspired such commitment from the Braga players worked just as well even in the more challenging dressing room of a bigger club.
“His playing style is clearly pragmatic,” says Meneses. “He is a studious coach, with a great capacity for work and a lot of intuition. In addition, he is a born leader, with great communication skills, both internally and externally. He is contagious with his will to win and with the conviction that only with hard work from everyone is this possible. Group work is really a crucial point of Ruben Amorim’s philosophy.”
Two things stand out about Sporting last season. The first is their defence. Marshalled by the 31-year-old Liverpool and Sunderland old boy Sebastian Coates, they conceded only 20 goals all season. It was, according to TheAnalyst.com, the best defence in Europe, permitting an average of 0.73 expected goals against (xGA) per game.
The other is how good Sporting were in the final minutes of games, scoring in stoppage time in nine of their league games, winning themselves nine extra points in the process. Amorim had instilled such remarkable belief into the players that they were always convinced they could win.
Perhaps the most important win of all came on April 25. Sporting had drawn three of their last four games and felt Porto breathing down their necks. They went away to an in-form Braga and, after 18 minutes, had Goncalo Inacio sent off. But they dug in and then, with nine minutes left, Matheus Nunes’ goal won them the game.
Three more victories after that won Sporting the title, to go with their Taca da Liga trophy from earlier in the season. It was their first championship since 2001-02, back when they had Mario Jardel, Hugo Viana and a young Ricardo Quaresma.
After a generation of Porto and Benfica domination, it felt like a transformative moment in Portuguese football.
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Of course, the football food chain being what it is, Sporting could not keep all of their players last summer. Nuno Mendes was sold to Paris Saint-Germain, while Joao Mario moved across town to Benfica. But Sporting’s level this year has not dropped too much. They are battling Porto foe the title, are in the middle of a successful Champions League campaign, and have retained the Taca da Liga (Amorim’s third in a row).
Whatever happens against Manchester City today and at the Etihad on March 9, there will be questions about what Amorim will do next.
He has been mentioned in connection with the Manchester United and Tottenham jobs in the past, although for now, he wants to stay put and keep winning with Sporting.
When he does leave, his next move will be up the game’s pecking order.
Grab your 🍿: Tuesday, @ChampionsLeague nights are back ✨#UCL #SportingCP pic.twitter.com/3RrQNpg7v8
— Sporting CP English 🏆 (@SportingCP_en) February 13, 2022
“Ruben is destined to join a top club in the ‘Big Five’ leagues,” says Meneses. “It will have to be an ambitious project. He is an extremely ambitious coach. There will be nothing to excite him other than the ambition to win big trophies.
“Due to the leadership he demonstrates and the quality with which he works, I have no doubt that he will be an unavoidable name in European football in the coming years.”
(Lead graphic: Sam Richardson, Getty Images)
