When Manuel Rui Costa was 16, legend has it he was admitted to hospital with appendicitis. It was the spring of 1988 and his team, Benfica, were in the semi-finals of the European Cup. No matter how unwell he felt, the teenager absolutely had to be there when Benfica played Steaua Bucharest at the Estadio da Luz. As a boy, he’d heard stories about the legendary team of Eusebio and Mario Coluna reaching the final five times in the 1960s. For his generation, this was it.
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The tie was delicately poised after a stalemate in Romania a fortnight earlier. Rui Costa couldn’t miss it and so he apparently discharged himself from the ward and was in the stands with 120,000 others to watch Rui Aguas score a brace and send Benfica through to their first final in this competition for 20 years. Defeat to PSV Eindhoven in a penalty shoot-out followed in Stuttgart but the Eagles returned to the final in 1990 where, unfortunately, Bela Guttman’s curse endured and Arrigo Sacchi’s AC Milan prevailed.
On a grey Tuesday morning in Lisbon, young Benfica fans wished to have the same experience Rui Costa did all those years ago ahead of their quarter-final against Liverpool. “You cannot kill the dream,” Benfica’s CEO Domingos Soares de Oliveira tells The Athletic. The economic stratification of the European game since Rui Costa’s day — back when gate receipts at the Estadio da Luz helped place Benfica on a more equal footing with the continent’s other giants — makes it feel more like an impossible dream now than it did in the past. Benfica have to be realistic. Liverpool put five past Portugal’s undefeated league leaders Porto at the Dragao in September. They are one of the favourites to win the competition, maybe one of the best Premier League teams of all time. But hope dies hard.
“If you ask the management, the coach, the players, they all live the dream right now,” Soares de Oliveira insisted on the eve of the game. “Let’s talk tomorrow night but for the time being we live the dream.”
Few teams can rival Benfica’s history and tradition in this competition. To pass Eusebio’s statue and see that coral coloured shirt is to be reminded of the role this club played in establishing the European Cup as the absolute pinnacle of club football on this continent. Real Madrid may have won the first five editions of what would evolve into the Champions League. The competition became entwined in their DNA. The same promised to be true of Benfica who made it to four finals in the opening five years of the following decade.
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Reaching one today would be extraordinary just as it was when Ajax came so close a couple of years ago. These two legendary clubs are almost condemned by geography, limited in earning power by small TV markets in leagues outside the top five. As fate would have it one knocked the other out to qualify for the quarter-finals with Darwin Nunez’s header at the Johan Cruyff Arena ensuring Benfica progressed to this stage for the first time since 2016. What was once the norm is now an exception. The ordinary now the extraordinary.
“You see clubs like ours, clubs like Ajax, like Villarreal. They are the underdogs,” Soares de Oliveira says. “The ones no one is expecting to see.” A smile lights up on his face when he recalls events in Turin a fortnight ago. “I take the example of my good friend Fernando Roig when his team beat Juventus. I think the odds were much more on the Juventus side than on Villarreal. We had these experiences too. (In 2013 and 2014) We played two Europa League finals (losing in stoppage time to Chelsea in Amsterdam then Sevilla) and in the qualification phase we succeeded against clubs (Juventus, Tottenham and Newcastle) that were much richer than us.”
As Luisao, the towering centre-back turned technical director, watched the draw in UEFA’s House of Football, fond memories like these and the time Benfica knocked holders Liverpool out in 2006, take you into a realm of the imagination where nothing is impossible. They are what make football the beautiful game and highlight the jeopardy of sport when an element of meritocracy is still at its core, something that was missing from the Super League proposals.
“We can understand the idea behind the concept from the clubs in order to generate additional revenues,” Soares de Oliveira empathises, “We — and when I say ‘we’ it’s not only Benfica, it’s the football family and the majority of the clubs who were not part of the Super League — We believe meritocracy is extremely important.
“A closed league maybe took place in other parts of the globe but not at European level. We think UEFA is a key partner and what I saw in the last general assembly of the European Club Association (ECA) in Vienna a week ago was a strong relationship between UEFA and ECA. This goes in the right direction. The ECA is the entity that is responsible for defending the club’s interest and working hand-in-hand with UEFA, having a Memorandum of Understanding that’s very clear, having Aleksander Ceferin also attending our general assembly. All those things are going in the right direction. In a certain sense I am sure that the big clubs will continue to play among the big clubs but it should not be a closed competition. It has to be under the rules established with us.”
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What the NFL and NBA do have going for them though is more variation in who challenges for the biggest prize of all. Monaco, Schalke, Lyon, Ajax and Roma have reached semi-finals over the last decade but that has proven a glass ceiling and they have subsequently been broken up. Vultures pick off the Eagles and the environment is now even more challenging.
“There are some issues the industry has not faced in the past,” Soares de Oliveira explains. “One is Brexit. Brexit for sure will impact the majority of clubs because I would say 90 per cent of the clubs (in Portugal) depend on player trading in order to reach their target in terms of figures. Brexit made things a little bit more complicated especially when it comes to UK clubs and even if it is not directly it can be indirectly because if the UK clubs invest more inside the UK and less outside at the end of the day it will affect clubs like Benfica. Brexit had a strong impact. COVID had a strong impact in terms of the revenues you missed like matchday revenues. But it also affected player spending.” Between 2019 and 2021 the transfer market contracted from $7.4bn to $4.9bn.
“We had the deal for Ruben Dias in August 2020” when Man City paid Benfica €68 million for their homegrown centre-back, “and since then nothing because the clubs were a little bit frozen in terms of investments. Now we have the crisis in Ukraine which apart from the real problems, of course, affects investments from Russians who could invest in clubs and did invest in some clubs.”
This year marks a decade since Zenit Saint Petersburg paid Benfica €40 million for Axel Witsel. Only last summer, Shakhtar Donetsk stumped up €18 million for Pedrinho. “We are facing different crises that affect the market and especially the football industry as we have never seen before,” Soares de Oliveira continues.
These are turbulent times in the world and Benfica has been shaken up a lot in the last year. The club’s longstanding president Luis Filipe Vieira resigned after a judge ordered him to be kept under house arrest amid an investigation into tax fraud and money laundering. “We had elections in October,” Soares de Oliveira says. “We changed president. The previous president was in charge since 2003. It’s a huge change. Now we have Rui Costa. It’s the first time in Portugal that a former player became president. It’s something that, in my opinion, goes in the right direction. I have some friends in the same position too, as was the case with Karl-Heinz Rummenigge (at Bayern Munich) and Edwin van der Sar (at Ajax).”
Benfica could have done with Rui Costa on the pitch on Tuesday night although his memories of Liverpool are of coming on in extra time in Istanbul for AC Milan in 2005. “He was already a good No 10, now I think he’s a good No 1 and, by No 1, I don’t mean goalkeeper,” Soares de Oliveira laughs. “We’ve worked together since he retired as a player and joined the board. I think we’ve been working together since 2009. That’s a long time and I think it’s a good thing. It’s more or less the same situation as Kalle and Edwin’s. They had the time to prepare themselves for this position. The fact they live football, love football and have so much experience.
“This is the trend for the future. I think you’ll see more and more football players in this position. Rui knows what’s happening on the pitch. He knows what’s happening in the board room. He knows what’s happening in the different institutions that control and manage football. He also has experience as a businessman not only because of his success in his personal life but because he has more than 10 years’ experience as a board member. The same situations that I’ve experienced. If we talk about sponsors, strategies for increasing matchday revenues, TV rights, he knows. It’s very positive for the club and for the industry.”
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The season so far at Benfica has been one of ups and downs. On the one hand, they defeated Barcelona for the first time since 1961 and won in Amsterdam after 43 years. Reaching the last eight of the Champions League is worth an estimated €65.33 million (close to one Ruben Dias).
On the other, Benfica parted company with Jorge Jesus before Christmas. Jesus had returned to the Estadio da Luz on a high after winning the Copa Libertadores with Flamengo. But he was unable to repeat his past success at the club. Benfica were then knocked out of the cup by Sporting and haven’t managed to regain lost ground in the Primeira Liga under serial caretaker boss, Nelson Verissimo, who has instead blooded youngsters like Paulo Bernardo and Morato. Benfica warmed up for the Liverpool game by losing away to Braga for the first time in seven and a half years and slipped nine points off the final automatic qualification place for the Champions League. On the home front at least this risks turning into Benfica’s most disappointing season since 2008.
“As you mentioned, the fact that we are right now third in the Portuguese league means that if we finish in this position then our things become a little bit more complicated,” Soares de Oliveira admits. “There’s always a risk when you go to the third qualifying round of the Champions League and then the play-offs. We had a good result this season. But you never know what’s going to happen next season.”
PSV were the team Benfica had to overcome to make the group stages in August, a revenge of sorts for the 1988 European Cup final and, if the latest reports in Portugal are to be believed, it’s their coach, Roger Schmidt, whom the Eagles consider to the right man to make them a contender again this summer. Whoever Rui Costa settles on, they will have to buy into the Benfica model.
“We depend on player trading,” Soares de Oliveira says. “It’s a kind of pipeline where we have talented players — some coming through the academy (Dias, Joao Cancelo, Bernardo Silva, Joao Felix, Renato Sanches) and others that we bought at an earlier stage (Ederson, Jan Oblak, David Luiz, Darwin Nunez, Luka Jovic, Lazar Markovic, Axel Witsel, Talisca). We try to produce an additional revenue stream with these guys in order to support the investments we have to do with others. It’s quite complicated because by the end of the season, if there’s a good offer you will most probably lose your best player. But it’s also a challenge to nurture and create players who will succeed in one, two or three years from now. The academy is extremely important in this process.”
A study by the Swiss think-tank CIES published earlier this month showed that, since July 2015, Benfica’s Seixal academy is the most profitable in Europe, bringing in a colossal €379 million. That’s not a bad return on the €10 million investment Benfica make in it every year. “It’s important to have a similar vision from all internal stakeholders,” Soares de Oliveira underlines. “So the coach we have in the first team knows it’s important to promote some young players that are right now playing for the Under-19s or the B team. It’s part of a strategy and at the end of the day you can cope with this strategy.
“You can be very focused and have strong success. But you have the theory and then the practical terms. Some coaches are more focused on promoting young players. Others are more focused on having guys who are mature and experienced to deliver results. It’s our responsibility as a board to try in every moment to align again the strategy with what we have defined as the strategy.”
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It has allowed Benfica to punch above its weight and have a chance of competing in the Champions League. Still, you wonder what if they were able to keep hold of their stars for longer. Rui Costa spent three seasons in the first team before Fiorentina lured him to Serie A to play with Gabriel Batistuta. Nowadays Joao Felix and Renato Sanches are gone after a year. Bernardo Silva didn’t play more than half an hour for the first team before he was loaned and then sold to Monaco. Paulo Bernardo could be next.
“Benfica’s ability to retain talent is limited,” Soares de Oliveira says. “We can retain players at an early age but it’s impossible to retain them forever. What we have done until now is try to have similar growth to the big clubs (elsewhere in Europe). If they grow by 15 per cent, we have to grow by 15 per cent. Portugal is such a small country. The amount of revenues you can generate internally is very limited. The majority of our sponsors are non-Portuguese companies; Emirates, the Heineken Group, Adidas, Repsol. Among our top 10 sponsors, we have one Portuguese company.”
Foreign investment has been slow to enter the Portuguese game although Estoril and Casa Pia are now in Spanish and American hands while Flamengo have been exploring synergies with Tondela. Last year, the US businessman John Textor was introduced by an investment bank to one of the shareholders in Benfica’s limited company, Jose Antonio dos Santos, and explored gradually building a stake in it. In the end it came to nothing.
In a statement, Textor called Benfica “the sleeping giant in world football” and wrote: “I believe I may be one of the people that can bring ideas to the Benfica community that can help improve the capitalisation and the revenues of the club, for a purpose that is right for the fans… the goal to keep many more of the best players of SL Benfica playing for SL Benfica. It’s clear that the thrill of playing in the Champions League, for Benfiquistas, has become less of a thrill, and more of an expectation. Shouldn’t it now be the goal to win?”
Upon reflection, Soares de Oliveira says while it ultimately didn’t happen the very entertainment of Textor’s interest represented a shift in mentality within Portuguese football. “For the first time, the behaviour was of an open company. It was no longer: ‘We are here and no one can come in’. I think the trend today is that the Portuguese clubs — and I’m talking about Benfica but I could say the same things from the others — they have to be open in terms of potentially new investors in the clubs depending on two major things.
“One is that the clubs — and I think Porto, Sporting and Benfica have the same vision — cannot lose the majority they have in the listed company. But they would welcome new shareholders if, for example, they would allow them to move on geographical terms in terms of sponsorship and getting better conditions in terms of financing. So they should be open to new investors if there’s some added value from those investors, although I don’t think one of those three clubs can lose the majority in their listed company.”
In the meantime the focus has to be on getting Benfica back to doing what they do best as well as growing the domestic pie.
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Soares de Oliveira feels the way to do that is to centralise the local TV rights by 2028, if not earlier, as part of an effort to make the competitiveness of Portuguese football a bit deeper. Private equity group CVC have, in the past, expressed an interest in investing in the league just as they have done in La Liga. “I think we’re missing something other leagues have which is a second tier in terms of the clubs that could perform well at European level,” says Soares de Oliveira.
“Usually it’s always these four clubs (Benfica, Sporting, Porto and Braga). Then you might have a Vitoria Guimaraes or a Maritimo. But it’s difficult for them to perform well. If you look at why Portugal is suffering in the European co-efficient compared with the Dutch league it’s mainly because there are lots of clubs in the Netherlands that perform well in the Conference League. We don’t have the same situation here in Portugal.”
But look on the bright side.
“In European terms even if it is only four clubs the fact that in a small country we had three teams in the group phase of the Champions League, Benfica are in the quarter-finals of the Champions League and Braga the quarter-final of the Europa League is quite interesting.”
It’s hard to expect much more. In the first half last night, it looked like Liverpool were going to run up the score just as they had done in Porto. Goals from Ibrahima Konate and Sadio Mane put them 2-0 up at the break and frankly it could have been worse. The surprise was how close Benfica came to fighting back. For a fleeting moment it felt like a repeat of the game against Ajax here when Verissimo’s men twice came from behind to keep the tie in the balance ahead of the away leg.
Rafa Silva sparked Benfica into life and Nunez delivered. The Uruguayan’s goal at the start of the second half was his fifth in the competition this season and the calibre of his opponents he has scored against — Barcelona, Bayern, Ajax and Liverpool — makes the hype he is generating understandable. The 22-year-old’s goal did not have the feeling of a consolation but a call to arms.
All of a sudden the Estadio da Luz was bouncing again and the dream, to borrow Soares de Oliveira’s phrase, was well and truly alive. Darwin felt he should have had a penalty. Alisson had hearts in mouths when he almost played himself into trouble under pressure from Rafa. But he never got round the goalkeeper in the style of Luis Diaz, who restored Liverpool’s two-goal advantage after Naby Keita slipped him through one-against-one with Odysseas Vlachodimos.
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It was an appropriately Darwinian end to the game, but sadly not in the way Benfica fans would have liked. Liverpool were able to sign the best player in Portugal over the winter, one that had never been on the losing side at the Estadio da Luz. They paid €45 million for him and the signing was still framed as a bargain in a Premier League context.
The strongest got stronger and ultimately survived.
Diaz’s role in Benfica’s defeat was a painful parable setting their place in the football order in stark relief again.
(Top photo: Patricia De Melo Moreira/AFP via Getty Images)
