The influence of former striker Tamagnini Manuel Gomes Batista, Tamagnini Nenê, manager of Benfica’s youth categories during the 1980s, marked the life of Flamengo’s new coach, Portuguese Paulo Sousa, 51.
Tamagnini is a local idol, the player with the most games in the club’s history, but he was also known for a curious reputation: that a good player doesn’t need to get his shorts dirty to shine.
The philosophy of an elegant and less combative football was never forgotten by Sousa as a player or coach.
“I like to see my teams expressing all their romantic or poetic, individual and collective content”, he said in an interview to the Portuguese website Tribuna Expresso, in 2020.
Romanticism as a coach and classic style as a player also go hand in hand with his personality. A former steering wheel with a refined touch —he would like to be compared to Paulo Roberto Falcão—, it is not uncommon for him to be the protagonist in controversial attitudes.
During the trip to Fiorentina, between 2015 and 2017, I lived a kind of honeymoon with Florence and with the club’s fans when in the first season, without big names, surprisingly led the team to the leadership of the Italian Championship between the sixth and the 12th round.
He finished the competition in fifth place and with praised performances for showy football that season, but, months later, he would break with the club’s board for not being met in a series of requests for reinforcements. He even forbade managers to follow their training.
A situation similar to the one he experienced in Bordeaux in 2019. After spending time at Tianjin Quanjian, public complaints to President Frédéric Longuépée in interviews about the lack of reinforcements were recurrent. Upon leaving the club, he called the Frenchman “a sleeping giant”.
The surprising break with the Polish national team, three months before the start of the play-off for the World Cup, has led to him being called a “deserter” in capital letters on the cover of the local newspaper Przeglad Sportowy. The president of the Polish Federation (FZPN, in its original acronym), Cezary Kulesza, criticized the position.
Eccentricity and personality
“Paulo Sousa always had his own world, he liked to be different. Of course, I’m talking about someone with 19, 20 years old and I’m more experienced at Benfica. He always arrived late and, as he was one of the captains, I talked a lot to him about that,” Rui Águas, a former Benfica teammate, tells Folha.
Águas also worked with Sousa as coach Artur Jorge’s assistant in the Portugal selection between 1996 and 1997. “I remember a time when he showed up without socks to train, just wearing his boot. He was already established. Artur Jorge was crazy about him, but shows some of his eccentricity and personality.”
Paulo Sousa is part of the so-called golden generation of Portugal alongside names such as Luís Figo, Rui Costa, Vítor Baía, Paulo Futre and Fernando Couto, under-20 world champions under the command of Carlos Queiroz in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 1989 .
Interestingly, the relationship is distant with the country due to a controversial choice in 1993. Amid a serious financial crisis experienced by Benfica, it opted to leave for rival Sporting. Until today, the act has never been forgiven by Benfica fans.
A year later, Sousa moved to Juventus and would never return to Portugal as a player. He played for Borussia Dortmund, became champion of the Champions League in 1996 and 1997, but suffered a considerable decline in his career, hampered by knee injuries.
He also passed through Inter Milan, Parma and Panathinaikos before an early finish at Espanyol, aged 31. As soon as he finished his career, he worked at the Portuguese Football Federation (FPF) and started to aim for professional improvement, visiting clubs and participating in courses.
As a coach, he started in the youth teams of the Portuguese team and, later, as assistant to Luiz Felipe Scolari, but he was never able to coach a local club.
His first chance was at Queens Park Rangers, in 2008. In England, he went through Swansea and Leicester before moving to Videoton FC, currently Fehérvár, in Hungary, where he won his first titles.
He also headed to Maccabi Tel Aviv, from Israel, and Basel, from Switzerland, until the most well-known and recent challenges of his career by Fiorentina, Bordeaux and the Polish national team.
Sousa was appointed by Patrick Vieira, former defensive midfielder of the French national team, as one of the most relevant coaches in France in 2019. Even so, he still lacks great results in his career. So far, the best performance was 63%.
At Flamengo, already under pressure, he will have the mission of rebuilding a team that won everything in recent seasons, but which succumbed to its main challenges in 2021. Personality and romanticism will not be lacking for that.
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