How One Portuguese Masters's Course Has Impacted Premier League Coaching

Ruben Amorim's first game as Manchester United boss was a quick reminder of just how competitive the modern Premier League is; despite showing flashes of quality, his side was matched by Kieran McKenna's newly-promoted Ipswich Town team in many departments, and United's coaching staff would have been fairly happy to leave East Anglia with a point on the board.

Just a couple of weeks later, United crashed to defeat at Old Trafford against Nottingham Forest, and in the same weekend, widely-renowned sporting director Dan Ashworth parted company with the club just five months after being appointed, to widespread confusion. If it wasn't already obvious, the size of the task ahead will now be abundantly clear for Ruben Amorim and the rest of his coaching team.

However, early signs suggest that the new Manchester United head coach is well-equipped to deal with this tricky job. The 39-year-old is part of an impressive group of coaches that have emerged from Portugal in recent years having been coached in many of the same principles by some of the game's leading tacticians and thinkers.

In this article, we'll be exploring the influence of one little-known University of Lisbon-affiliated advanced football coaching course — attended by Amorim and many others — when it comes to creating a cohort of coaches now having a major impact on the Premier League.

The Increased Presence of Portuguese Coaches in England

When Jose Mourinho was appointed Chelsea manager in the summer of 2004, he became the first Portuguese man to take charge of a Premier League side. Over four spells in the English top flight (two with Chelsea, one with Manchester United and one with Spurs), 'the Special One' had a profound impact on the English game, winning three Premier League titles, four League Cups, and the UEFA Europa League across a 14-year period. He was victorious in 217 of the 363 Premier League games he managed, making him by far the most successful and experienced Portuguese manager to ply their trade in the UK to date.

However, another crucial part of his legacy is the role he played in paving the way for other Portuguese coaches with little or no English league experience to move to the Premier League and be successful. Seven of his countrymen have followed in his footsteps — Andre Villas-Boas, Nuno Espirito Santo, Marco Silva, Bruno Lage, Carlos Carvalhal, Ruben Amorim and now Wolves' new boss Vitor Pereira —  and while they have had varying levels of success, the notion that Portugal is a country capable of producing talented coaches has become entrenched. At the time of writing, there are twice as many Portuguese head coaches in the EPL (four) as there are English head coaches (two). In order to trace how we got to this point, it's worth digging into Mourinho's backstory in a little more detail.

Inside Mourinho's Unique Educational Journey 

Many people are aware of the details of Jose Mourinho's journey to the top of European football. Lacking the physicality needed to become a professional player, he turned his focus to coaching at a fairly young age and attended courses hosted by both the English and Scottish Football Associations in order to grow his knowleedge. Mourinho ultimately got his first major break back in Portugal, working as Bobby Robson's translator at Sporting CP. He then moved to Porto with Robson and gradually became more involved with tactics and strategy at the club, rising to assistant manager and becoming known for his defensive acumen. After working as an assistant at Porto and Barcelona he was rewarded with his first managerial post at Benfica in 2000, and the rest is history.

But there's a key facet of Mourinho's path to the top that many people don't know too much about. In the early days of his coaching career, the Special One gained a huge amount from studying at the Lisbon-based higher education facility the Higher Institute of Physical Education (ISEF), which would later become the Faculdade de Motricidade Humana (FMH) or Faculty of Human Kinetics. Part of the Technical University of Lisbon, this institution played a key role in Mourinho's development as a coach.

In a recent piece for the Observer, Rob Draper observed how a 26-year-old Mourinho "signed up for the sports science course and took an especially enthusiastic interest in the university football league and the team of professors of which he was player-coach." He added that: "Everyone knows Mourinho got his big break as Robson's translator at Sporting but fewer recall that Mourinho's initial pathway into football was academic." This classroom-based approach to the beautiful game would go on to have a major influence on the cohort of talented coaches that have emerged from Portugal in the years since the pioneering former translator left the institute to work in football full-time.

The Development of the Advanced Coaching Course

Professor Antonio Veloso was a former classmate of Jose Mourinho's at the faculty of human kinetics. In recent years, Veloso has used his experiences at the college to construct a well-regarded high-performance football coaching course affiliated with the University of Lisbon, and Mourinho has played a key role in the process of developing and rolling out this course. His involvement began with a phone call from Veloso, who had decided to set up a master's degree course in football coaching and believed he would benefit immensely from Mourinho's knowledge.

"Jose was always mentioning that he studied here and naming our faculty as his alma mater," Veloso told the Observer. "If we were designing a finance course, we would definitely use someone [in that sector] of his level to help us. So I called him and said: 'I think we have a unique opportunity to develop a programme based on your knowledge of football, linked with your academic background. You're in a unique position, having a scientific view of your profession.'" 

The duo developed a programme which places a lot of emphasis on the psychological elements of sport, from understanding how to negotiate with executives and owners, to improving communication with players and growing a greater understanding of physiology. Good governance in sport is covered, with EFL chair Rick Parry overseeing this area of the degree, while Rangers head coach Pedro Caixinha sits alongside Mourinho and Veloso as part of the course's esteemed team of lecturers, many of whom have experience at the top level of the game.

The Impact of the High Performance Football Coaching Course

The course has helped produce some extremely talented coaches. Probably the most high-profile recent graduate is Ruben Amorim, who was granted entry to the course in 2017 despite his professional playing career meaning he did not have an undergraduate degree. His extraordinary skills meant he was granted an exception to the usual rules of entry for the course, and he thrived under the tutelage of Veloso and his peers. On top of his academic studies Amorim also benefited from a week-long internship at Manchester United when Mourinho was manager (meaning he isn't a complete newcomer to Carrington and Old Traffford).

Other graduates from the high-performance football coaching course include Carlos Vicens, who has been Pep Guardiola's assistant coach since 2021, when he joined the first team after working his way through the youth ranks, and Pedro Marques, who is currently working as Liverpool's director of football development after being poached from Benfica in the summer. Amorim's assistant Carlos Fernandes, who has moved with him from Lisbon to Manchester, is another graduate of Cruz Quabrada, the Lisbon suburb by the Tagus estuary where many of Europe's most promising young coaches have honed their skills in recent years.

If we expand our perspective beyond just the Premier League, the group of talented Portuguese coaches operating across the world today includes Paulo Fonseca, Sérgio Conceição, Roberto Martinez, Vitor Bruno, Bruno Lage, Abel Ferreira, and many more. What's more, there are numerous talented assistants working in the Premier League and abroad who may go on to form their own senior coaching careers (Marco Silva's assistants Luis Boa Morte and Goncalo Pedro, for example, or Nuno's assistants Rui Pedro Silva and Julio Figueroa). Why this strength in depth? 

"The starting point of the revolution was the link between academia and the Portuguese federation," Veloso explained. "And then we got lucky to get some people who were extremely good. But it would be difficult to imagine someone [at a British university] asking your top Manchester United coach to organise a coach education programme such as ours… You need to have both worlds together, with experienced people working at a high level."

In England, there continues to be concern about the amount of outstanding homegrown coaches being produced, particularly given the quality of the English football pyramid and the global success that is the Premier League. For many people, the fact that in the advent of more coaching quality, the English FA were forced to head to Europe and acquire the services of German coach Thomas Tuchel was a source of embarrassment. Perhaps the solution to this problem is a more open-minded approach to coaching; in Portugal, greater alignment between the world of football and the world of academia has reaped serious rewards. Meanwhile, the comparative ease and affordability of embarking on a coaching course means that countries like Portugal and Spain are developing promising young coaches at a much higher rate than the UK. Taking a leave out of the Portuguese coaching manual and getting some inspiration from Veloso's course certainly wouldn't be a bad idea.

If you want to find out more about Portugal's path towards becoming a hub for developing footballing talent, why not check out our guide to the hugely productive Benfica talent factory? Or if you want to check out all of the best Football coaching courses on the market, check out the Football Course Database.