O Jogo have been discussing AVB's tactical approach.

I enjoyed this morning's article discussing his methods to prepare for training.

- Coaches arrive 30 minutes before players

- On the field, two cameras are setup recording from opposite angles for each drill

- Every coach has to watch the tapes each night

- Players receive a scripted itinerary of training for the entire week, covering all exercises and scheduled times

- The discussion at the beginning of training outline what the expected outcome at the end of the day is, down to specifically a technical piece or tactical instruction

 

Junior Mourinho.

 

 

The main members of his staff are:

Pedro Emanuel - Not much needs to be said here. The 35 year old is a Porto legend, ex-Captain, and is the living definition of everything our club stands for. Strong, passionate, fearless, and a winner, Pedro Emanuel will oversee the defenders and alot of organization of the back four.

Vitor Pereira - 41 years old, AVB'ss number 2 assistant just joined us recently. We had to pay some money to get him out of Santa Clara where he was the manager of the Sao Miguel team. He actually coached our U-15 team back in 2002/03. He specializes in tactics and will likely be the man sitting next to AVB every game.

Wil Coort - The only guy who actually stays no matter who the manager is. He's been with us for quite a while. Our goalkeeping coach, he has a great relationship with the club and knows all of our keepers well down to the junior levels. The 49 year old Dutchman is quite highly paid for his position and has been a respected member of our club for many years.

Jose Mario Rocha - Head of the physio and fitness team. Also worked at Porto with AVB under Mourinho, and was at Academica in the last six months under AVB. A recognized doctor and professor of medicine, the 40 year old will be responsible for every last detail of our fitness and will play the largest role through the training camp in Germany in a week's time.

The members of Prof. Rocha's medical and fitness team are:

José Carlos Covelo Esteves
Nélson Filipe Romeu Puga Costa
José Mário Apresentação Almeida
Eduardo Augusto Costa Braga
José Luís do Carmo Ferreira
António Manuel Pereira Costa Dias

Manager of the U-19 team is Rui Pereira da Silva.

 

Wow Mourinho Part II!

@ pun, are you a Porto supporter?

 

Couple of articles written on him. First one is by Gabrielle Marcotti, the second from bbc Sport. First one is a month old, the second one is 2 weeks old.

Meet Portugal's Boy Genius

Some coaches get their shot with a major club at a relatively tender age (in coaching years, anyway). Barcelona's Pep Guardiola was 37 when he got the gig.

And there are those who get a crack at the big time without ever having played beyond amaetur level, like Aston Villa's Gerard Houllier. There's another, smaller subset which includes those who advanced to top jobs with little or no head-coaching experience, like Real Madrid's Jose Mourinho when he took over at Benfica.

But the above examples are all rare. Rarer still is a guy like Porto boss Andre Villas Boas, who falls squarely in all three categories and, if his vertical ascent continues, could herald a change in the way clubs recruit managers.

Mr. Villas Boas's side goes for its 12th consecutive win in a competitive match on Monday night when it makes the short drive inland to take on Vitoria Guimaraes. Right now, Porto is 11 for 11 in the Portuguese League, Europa League and Portuguese SuperCup. What's more, it has shut out the opposition in all but two games. And it did it despite the departure of two stalwarts – defender Bruno Alves and midfielder Raul Meireles – over the summer.

All of this is remarkable enough until you consider that Mr. Villas Boas is just 33 years old and, prior to this season, had just 23 league games' worth of managerial experience, all of them at Academica Coimbra, the provincial club which appointed him just over a year ago. When he took charge of Academica, it was winless and dead last. By the time the season was over, Mr. Villas Boas had guided it to respectability (11th place in the 16-team league) and to the semifinal of the Portuguese League Cup.

It was enough for Porto – one of the traditional Portuguese giants – to put its eggs in Mr. Villas Boas's basket in an attempt to bounce back from a rare season which saw it finish third, only the second time since 2002 that it failed to win the league.

Mr. Villas Boas was still a teenager when he started working in Porto's scouting department way back in the mid-1990s. The club was impressed both by the breadth of his tactical understanding and his ability to produce scouting reports players could digest easily. Yet he may never have gone any further if, in early 2002, the club had not turned to Mr. Mourinho, himself an unorthodox rising star of management. Mr. Mourinho took him under his wing, making Mr. Villas Boas an integral part of his staff, both at Porto, where he won two league titles, the Champions League and the UEFA Cup and later during his successful spells at Chelsea and Inter Milan. By the time he moved to Chelsea, Mr. Villas Boas's pre-match scouting included personalized DVDs for each player, outlining their direct opponent in the next game, including strengths, weaknesses and tendencies.

Given Mr. Mourinho's reputation, it was quite the calling card, and Mr. Villas Boas openly admits that it helped him land the Academica job. But he bristles at those who consider him Luke Skywalker to Mourinho's Yoda. Or, among his detractors, Mini Me to the self-anointed "Special One's" Dr. Evil.

While Mr. Villas Boas employs the 4-3-3 formation Mr. Mourinho used to such great effect at Chelsea, it's a more fluid system, with the wingers often turning into strikers. He lacks Mr. Mourinho's charisma – that unparalleled ability to seduce players, media and fans – and comes across as less confrontational and self-assured. On the other hand, he may be more tactically sophisticated and his Porto squad attacks more than Mourinho's teams at Chelsea and Inter (the jury's still out on Real Madrid).

It's tempting to call Mr. Villas Boas soccer's answer to Theo Epstein, who rose from the San Diego Padres' public relations department to become general manager of the Boston Red Sox at age 29. Both are outsiders who brought a novel approach to understanding the sport and landed important jobs at a young age. But the crucial difference is that Mr. Villas Boas's role is far more hands-on, running training sessions and making all the game-day decisions.

He's an interloper in the inner sanctum, having never played the game at any significant level. And while he's not the first to do so, those who came before him, like Mr. Houllier, served long apprenticeships working their way up through the lower leagues.

Mr. Villas Boas's appointment obviously owes a lot to his mentor. But it's also a bold move, a striking departure from the groupthink and conventional wisdom so prevalent in soccer. You'll know whether it worked the day you read a profile of Mr. Villas Boas that does not mention Mr. Mourinh

Villas-Boas makes Porto the toast of Portugal again

Porto suffered a blow, both to their self-esteem and coffers, when their four-year reign as Portuguese champions was ended by a resurgent Benfica last season.

Not only did they give up their title, they missed out on Champions League football for the first time since the 2002/03 campaign, confined instead to the relative backwaters of the Europa League.

Failing to make Europe's premier club competition cost Porto at least £8.5m (10m euros) - Braga have pocketed £11.6m (13.6m euros), Benfica £9.5m (11.1m euros) while the Europa League has only added £1.3m (1.6m euros) to the Porto bank account - and probably two key players as both Bruno Alves and Raul Meireles have both departed after advertising the fact that they were far from from happy at the club.

However, under new coach Andre Villas-Boas, the 2004 champions of Europe are grabbing the headlines again for all the right reasons, having gone unbeaten in 25 games in all competitions this season.

The 33-year-old Villas-Boas, currently the Portuguese first division's youngest coach, appears to be on a similar trajectory to mentor and former Porto boss Jose Mourinho.

Villas-Boas was part of Mourinho's backroom team at Porto, Chelsea and Inter Milan before moving from under the Special One's wing and taking over the reins at modest Academica - his first proper frontline job if you disregard a brief stint in his early 20s as coach of the British Virgin Islands - a couple of months into last season.

On paper, 11th place in a 16-team league does not look much to shout about. But when you consider Academica were looking like certain relegation candidates, lying at the bottom of the table and without a win to their name before the arrival of Villas-Boas, his success raised plenty of eyebrows in Portugal and brought him to the attention of the Porto president Pinto da Costa.

It was, as da Costa has admitted several times, a gamble to bring in Villas-Boas but one that has paid off handsomely so far.

What seems to make Villas-Boas special is that he has many of the same attributes of Mourinho. He has an obsession for researching the opposition and started off producing scouting reports for then Porto boss Bobby Robson in the 1990s while still a teenager. Famously, while at Stamford Bridge, his scouting reports included personalised DVDs for each player, outlining their opposite number's strengths and weaknesses.

Villas-Boas has also shown himself to be a superb psychologist. The Dragoes coach has managed to convince, and sound sincere even to the sceptics, that everyone is special at Porto, allowing him to get the best out of both the established first-teamers and fringe players, such as summer signing James Rodriguez.

"Every player in the squad is an important player. They all have a place," said Villas-Boas last week. "I have praised both Andre Castro and Ukra (Andre Monteiro) publicly and privately. I don't want to lose them. James has incredible potential and I intend to make him realise it. He will have opportunities (in the Portuguese Cup and Europa League) against Juventude Evora and Sofia, which will be good opportunities for him and they won't be his last, that's for sure."

James responded to the public pat on the back with two outstanding games, scoring Porto's final goal in their 3-1 win over CSKA Sofia in the Europa League on Wednesday.

A 4-0 win over third division side Juventude de Evora in the Portuguese Cup on Saturday also set a club record of 34 unbeaten matches in all competitions, taking into account the end of last season. It consigned to history the previous best run, achieved when Mourinho was at the helm.

Ever since their 5-0 thrashing of current champions Benfica in November - after which Villas-Boas publicly tore apart the tactics of his opposite number Jorge Jesus and told him how and why Benfica had been beaten - talk has been rampant about the possibility of Porto going through the season undefeated, at least in the league.

Mourinho won the Europa League's predecessor, the Uefa Cup, in his first season in charge and Porto are among the favourites to take this season's trophy. So is the apprentice set to emulate his master?

I must confess, I am a little bit hesitant to applaud Villas-Boas too loudly. I am well aware that I praised Porto back in February only for them to endure a two-month slump that saw them slip out of contention in the Portuguese title race and crash out of the Champions League following a 5-0 defeat to Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium. However, this season may be a little different.

Striker Hulk may not get the recognition were he playing in England, Spain or Italy but he remains a world-class finisher, currently topping the league charts with 12 goals.

He has been ably supported up front by Colombian international Falcao, who has seven goals. So highly rated is Falcao, who joined Porto from Argentine side River Plate for £4.7m (5.5m euros) in the summer of 2009, that there have been reports in both the Spanish and Portuguese media in recent days that he could be on his way across the border next summer if a Spanish club - Atletico Madrid get mentioned a lot in this context - make da Pinto an offer he cannot refuse.

After a lacklustre final season at Sporting and following his acrimonious transfer from the club where he started his professional career, Joao Moutinho is back to form and often sees plenty of action on the wings, in contrast to his previous role as a central midfielder.

Perhaps the big difference for Porto has been the goalkeeper. The previously error-prone and inconsistent Helton has been outstanding and putting up a very strong case for a recall to the Brazilian side after missing out on the World Cup. His heroics have meant Porto have conceded goals in only four of their 13 league games this season.

Despite their rather lacklustre Champions League campaign, Benfica have not yet thrown in the towel domestically but their away form this season - they have lost as many games as they have won - has meant they have not been able to keep up with Porto and are currently eight points adrift in second place.

Last season's svengali, Jesus - JJ to many Benfica supporters - looked a rather haunted figure on the sidelines during last week's Champions League 2-1 defeat at home to Schalke. He still has the support of Benfica president Luis Felipe Vieira but few pundits dare to speculate for how much longer.

If Benfica fans feel a bit despondent about the way this season is going, then they can always cast their mind back to the golden era of the 1960s. There have been plenty of reminders of that period in recent days as Wednesday was the 50th anniversary of Eusebio's arrival on Portuguese soil, having signed for the Eagles from his local club in Mozambique, Sporting Clube de Lourenço Marques.

Eusebio was arguably the first player from sub-Saharan Africa to make an impact on European club football, having collected a long list of honours, including the 1965 European Footballer of the Year award. In 1968, he became the first winner of the Golden Boot, a feat he repeated five years later.

British football fans with long memories or attentive parents know him for his displays at the 1966 World Cup, during which he scored nine goals. But at Benfica he is still referred to in hallowed terms for helping the side to their 1961 and 1962 European Cup wins, scoring two goals in the latter, which was to be the last Portuguese triumph for 25 years. His domestic statistics still remain stunning. He was the top scorer in the Portuguese league seven times and helped Benfica to 11 titles between 1961 and 1975.

How Jesus and Benfica fans must wish they had a modern-day version of Eusebio now.

 

He has extended his contract for another 2 years with an increase in salary. Now goes until 2013.

Congrats AVB, the future is bright.

 

Very impressed by the football played under him , looking forward to seeing Porto in the CL next season. I am convinced he is gonna become an absolute top manager.

Curious to read his interview after the Benfica match.

 

In his first season, we win the title with 5 games left in the season.

What a manager. roud:

 

André Villas Boas steps out from José Mourinho's shadow at Porto

José Mourinho's former protégé André Villas Boas has engineered a stunning revival at Porto that has put him on major clubs' radar

in The Guardian's The Sport Blog, 15.04.2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/apr/15/andre-villas-boas-porto


The spectre of José Mourinho is rarely too distant when Chelsea enter the process of a managerial appointment. The irony on Wednesday, as it emerged that Carlo Ancelotti was set to be relieved of his responsibilities at Stamford Bridge at the end of the season, was that the Portuguese was present and correct in London.

Mourinho watched his Real Madrid team win 1-0 at Tottenham Hotspur to smooth their passage into the Champions League semi-finals and he spent the majority of the post-match press conference complaining about yellow card-related suspensions and the Spanish press. The discussion only switched to his former club Chelsea and Ancelotti long enough for him to state that while a return to the Premier League appealed, his immediate future lay at the Bernabéu. "I stay at Real Madrid next season," he said. "Unless the press sacks me..."

It can sometimes feel as if there is a yearning at Chelsea to return to the glory days of Mourinho, who won everything bar the Champions League during his three-and-a-bit seasons in west London. There is certainly a faction within the squad who would welcome him back. But if the master cannot be persuaded to succeed Ancelotti, then what of the apprentice?

André Villas Boas is the hottest young coaching talent in Europe. The 33-year-old has taken Porto to the Portuguese league title with games to spare – the team's record to date is worth recording; P26 W24 D2 L0 F61 A11 – while success in Europe beckons too. Porto are into the semi-finals of the Europa League, after seeing off Spartak Moscow 10-3 on aggregate, a 5-2 win in Russia last night sealing an emphatic victory. This is Villas Boas' first full season as a manager and his impact has been nothing short of sensational. Porto finished third in the championship last season, behind Benfica and Braga.

Villas Boas, though, has a cross to bear and it is the moniker of Mourinho Mk II, Mini-Mourinho or any number of variations on the theme. He does not like it, principally because he has always been his own man, strong-minded to a fault, but also because his relationship with his one-time mentor has cooled. Yet the superficial similarities are so great that Villas Boas knows that he must live with it.

Like Mourinho, Villas Boas was not a player of repute and, like Mourinho, he was given his introduction to the professional game by Sir Bobby Robson, largely on the strength of his fluency in English. Villas Boas, who has an English grandmother, lived in the same apartment block as Robson, when the latter was the Porto manager and he pestered him for a break.

Characteristically, Robson responded to the 16-year-old's enthusiasm and he took him to watch Porto train and hired him to work in the club's scouting and statistics department. He would also arrange for him to enjoy work experience with George Burley at Ipswich Town and to take his coaching badges at Lilleshall.

"It was a long time ago," Burley said, "but I remember André as a really nice fella, who was very intelligent and wanted to learn. It's great to experience different cultures. I myself was brought up under Sir Bobby Robson and if he called, you helped him."

Villas Boas coached Porto's junior teams and he spent a year, at the age of 21, as the director of football of the British Virgin Islands but his career kicked on when Mourinho returned to Porto as the manager in 2002, after his job at Uniao Leiria. Mourinho appreciated Villas Boas' eye for detail and work ethic, and he appointed him as the club's head of opposition scouting. When Mourinho moved to Chelsea and Internazionale, he took Villas Boas with him in the same capacity.

Mourinho initially worked as a translator for Robson at Porto and Barcelona before he impressed him with his coaching acumen. He would be named by Louis Van Gaal, Robson's successor at the Camp Nou, as an opposition scout. "José analysed opponents for me and he did it very well," Van Gaal said. "You have to educate your assistants as well as your players."

By the time he moved to Chelsea, Villas Boas' pre-match scouting included personalised DVDs for each player. "I travel to training grounds," he said, in an interview at the time, "often incognito, and then look at our opponent's mental and physical state before drawing my conclusions and presenting a full dossier. José is obsessed with detail."

Villas Boas struck out on his own in October 2009, leaving Mourinho and Inter for Academica in Portugal's top-flight, who were without a victory and demoralised. He guided them to mid-table respectability and, in the process, persuaded Porto to re-employ him last June. It is believed that Villas Boas fell out with Mourinho in Milan, over his ambition to be promoted.

Villas Boas is wedded to 4-3-3 and a fast and dynamic, pressing style. His team is organised and motivated, and they are enjoying their rewards. So is Villa Boas, who has been linked to Liverpool and a number of Italian clubs, chief among them Roma. He says that he only wants to be a manager for 10 years, so all-consuming is the job, and he looks every inch the young man in a hurry. Villas Boas stands to emulate Mourinho by adding the Europa League to the domestic championship in his first season at Porto. Chelsea will be aware of his credentials.

 

what did he day to/about Garrido? Villareal seems very upset? are they going to report him to UEFA?

 

I'm officially in love with this man.

What a ****ing champion, and a born and bred Portista to the core.

 

on phaggy time?

 

Youngest coach to ever win a European title :thumbsup:

 

4 titles in his first season. Unbelievable.

 

To put to rest the silly Inter rumors, here it is straight from PdaC:

"Villas-Boas has a contract and a clause of 15 million. If somebody deposited in our account the 15 million and he wanted to go, we couldn't do anything because that's the contractual obligation. If this doesn't happen, he doesn't leave. We're not going to facilitate any type of negotiations. He'll only leave if 15 million is paid and he wants to go."

http://www.maisfutebol.iol.pt/fcpor...illas-boas-pinto-da-costa-clausula-rescisao-inter-maisfutebol/1261359-1304.html

Considering he has already rejected Liverpool, Roma, and others, and since he has given his word to continue managing his hometown club next year, he would reject them even if the 15m was paid.

AVB's agent said the rumors were "ridiculous."

 

We have lost AVB to the one club he couldn't reject: Chelsea.

They are paying the full 15m and we are already looking for a new manager.

What a kick in the teeth...

 

Your killing me Joshua lol.

I had my victory lap and everything! ffs

Whats the diffrence between Chelsea and Inter? or did we not agree to pay the sum?

 

The clause haven't been activated according yet it seems.

 

Yeah, let's see what happens...

 

Disgrace! I hate Chelsea with a passion. They will ruin him like Dzeko

 

He has to be a willing one.... apart from the buy-out.

I m sure he won't cuz Joshua said so.

 

Yo Josh, what's the story with that arm-band Porto coaches wear, and do they have to wear it, or?

 

All managers in Portugal have to wear that for games in our league, domestic cups, or home games in European competition.

 

josh knows nothing!!!!!1

 

Jonny knows everything.

 

I will not be surprise pdc tries Domingos or even Jesus.

 

I don't think so.

 

For Domingos they just need to do what Chelsea did.

 

I think it'll just be Vitor Pereira if AVB goes, don't want to change things too drastically as the squad is still in place.

 

And Vitor Pereira it is!

I'm very happy with this news, well as happy as possible after having our manager stolen from us.

He was AVB's assistant, managed Santa Clara last, and knows our club inside and out.

http://web3.cmvm.pt/sdi2004/emitentes/docs/FR34469.pdf