Portugal raised it´s football level step by step... but how?

Portugal is a country with long tradition in football but the truth is that only in the last 3 decades truly Portugal conquered a place among the greatest football nations.

Since the game started to be played in Portugal till 1990´s Portugal national team was only able to qualify to two world cup (1966 and 1986) and one European cup (1984).

A lot as changed in the Portuguese football during the 1980´s and 1990´s and one character emerged as important in this process, Carlos Queiroz!

Queiroz became the most recognizable face in the fight against the status quo that dominated the Portuguese football for long decades. His entrance to the youth development system of the Portuguese football federation became a turning point for the Portuguese football.

Apart from being two times world champion of U20 (1989 and 1991) Queiroz completely changed the youth systems and competitive schedules in the national championships. Those were great achievements by itself but what most influenced the development of Portuguese football was the coaching education that he launched and the doors that he tried to open for “non ex-famous players” in the world of professional football coaching.

What started by being an utopia would become a normal thing 20 years later and knowledge became more important than name in itself…

This arrival of new knowledge into football came mostly from the Lisbon university of sports (where Queiroz was also a teacher) with a new generation of coaches that later would become professionals. Among them would be José Mourinho, the greatest responsible for the complete change in the status quo and for successful completing the quest initiated by Queiroz 20 years before.

Meanwhile there was a voice getting louder and louder in FC Porto and in the sports university of Porto, Vitor Frade. Making a long story short after working many years in the FC Porto coaching staff, Frade started to build is own training methodology based on a scientific approach and with the practical experience that he was able to collect from working alongside top coaches. Tactical Periodization became a “black swan” taught in the university but without recognition outside the classroom.

When José Mourinho crossed is way with Vitor Frade in FC Porto coaching staff under sir Bobby Robson and later with Rui Faria (only assistant who followed Mourinho during all his career and former student from Vitor Frade) an instant click was made. Mourinho felt like this would be the edge he needed to be different, to be better coach. When Mourinho took over is first team has a head coach suddenly tactical periodization “came out of the closet” and the results are there to prove its validity and its practical application…

It’s easy to collect data about the increasing number of Portuguese coaches who are now working all around the world and most of them are actually winning….

It would be a lie to say that all of them are working under tactical periodization method, but it is undeniable that most of them are working with methods that got inspired, somehow, by the methodology created and developed by Vitor Frade.

Its true that most of them are not following the “rules” in a strict way but there are patterns of quality in the organization of the training sessions and in the development of a style of play that are giving more and more fame to the Portuguese coaching style.

Names like José Mourinho, André Villas-Boas, Carlos Carvalhal and Vitor Pereira, for example, are clearly identified as tp users and, at least, we can say that they gave an impulse to more strict criterium of quality in the training process. Like in everything in life when there is a group “raising the quality” others need to adapt or die, as stated by the law of natural selection from Charles Darwin…

Recently (2015) 8 Portuguese coaches won the national leagues in which they competed during that season, an amazing achievement for such a small nation!

Portuguese coaches who became champions of the national leagues in 2015

Also for 2 consecutive years Portugal was the country with the biggest number of coaches in the UEFA champions league that is probably the greatest recognition of quality training.

My personal experience took me to coach in Europe (Portugal and Poland), Asia (UAE, Qatar and Bahrain) and to work as methodology consultant in South America (Uruguay).

Along the way tactical periodization was always the “light at the end of the tunnel” that guided my coaching, nevertheless due to the different realities it needed to be “molded” to the context and the different environments.

A recent study made interviews with some of the most successful coaches in american sports trying to establish some patterns of behavior to success.

Adaptability was the only characteristic referred by all the coaches interviewed as essential for successful coaching. This is a capacity that biology has determined as fundamental for species survival (the more adaptable and not the strongest is likely to survive) and it sure is applicable to coaching.

But adaptability cannot or, should not, be abdicating from certain principles and ideas, for this it’s important to understand the notion of modelling (molding)… Modelling the play and modelling the training, but that is another story...