When ambitious, monied clubs in the Uefa Champions League look for leadership, they turn with startling regularity to a country with only faint hope of bringing the title back to its shores.
No Portuguese club have won the European Cup since Porto’s upstart triumph of 2004, and it would be surprising if, within another 10 years, another emulates that achievement.
But what Portugal can and does do is educate fine managers.
Football’s new wealth has chased them in the decade since Jose Mourinho styled himself the Special One after signing for Chelsea and well-heeled owner Roman Abramovich.
Mourinho is among six Portuguese in charge of the clubs who made this season’s Champions League field.
That is a half-dozen more in the elite competition of club football than there are, say, Englishmen plotting a route to the last 16.
It surpasses the number of coaches from Spain, the nation that tends to set current fashions in tactics, training and player development.
If Mourinho was the pathfinder, Zenit’s Andre Villas-Boas has been an even brisker collector of big jobs.
Only 37, yet Zenit is his fifth gig as manager. It is just over three years since “AVB”, or “mini-Mou” left Porto with a Europa League trophy to join Russian-owned Chelsea. After being dismissed from there, he managed Tottenham Hotspur.
Meanwhile, at Monaco, whose chief patron is the Russian Dimtry Rybolovlev, Leonardo Jardim patrols the technical area, headhunted to the Ligue 1 club thanks to his success in rejuvenating Sporting Portugal last season.
What could be guaranteed as soon as the draw for the groups were made was that all six Portuguese coaches would not be guiding their teams into the knockout stage.
Benfica, Zenit and Monaco are clustered together in Group C, where Villas-Boas, Benfica’s Jorge Jesus and Jardim have found the mini-league increasingly claustrophobic.
Jardim’s Monaco tonight take on Bayer Leverkusen, who lead the group by four points, and will know by kick-off if they need a win to stay in second place.
Zenit meet Benfica earlier in the day. Both clubs have four points, one less than Monaco. So, any loser in the Zenit-Benfica fixture could be eliminated by the night’s end.
It is an edgy scenario to fracture any compatriot loyalty between the managers.
Jesus, the veteran of the cadre and an excitable, energised touchline operator, has a long friendship with Villas-Boas.
He related the story of how, when Benfica beat Spurs on the way to the Europa League final last season, he had a vivid exchange with the manager of Tottenham at the time, Tim Sherwood. Jesus said, referencing AVB: “A few weeks ago, there was a Portuguese sitting in your seat and he knew a lot more about the game than you do.”
Villas-Boas knows Jesus enough to assume that in the tension of tonight’s high-stakes encounter, his old friend might save the compliments.
Their rivalry defined Portuguese football in 2010 and 2011, when Villas-Boas’s Porto were contesting domestic hierarchy with Jesus’s Benfica.
Last season, the joust at the top of the Superliga was between Jesus’s Benfica and Amorim’s Sporting.
Jesus, who has been at Benfica since 2009 and reached two Europa League finals – both ended in defeat – cannot help but wonder sometimes what might have awaited him had he taken the Mourinho, Villas-Boas or Amorim paths and coached in a wealthier league.
He has won domestic honours aplenty, but the economic reality of Portuguese football is that his best players tend to leave.
He will be reminded of that as he reads the Zenit line-up today. The Russian club’s extensive spending power has reinforced the spine of the team with three former Benfica stars: Defender Ezequiel Garay left Lisbon in the summer, midfielder Axel Witsel made the same move two years earlier for close to €40 million (Dh182.3m), while his partner in the engine room is Javi Garcia, once of Benfica, now commanding a higher salary at Zenit than he did in Portugal.
Witsel scored when Zenit won 2-0 in Lisbon, in September. The group games have followed an erratic, inconsistent pattern since. But this is a crucial night for Villas-Boas and Jesus, while Jardim, preparing for Monaco’s later game, will be hoping Zenit-Benfica ends in a draw.
If his compatriot managers can only cancel one another out, his team will be the chief beneficiary if Monaco can win.
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