Been mightily impressed with his conduct.
Hopefully his tactics and man-management can live up to the same standards.
Hopefully his tactics and man-management can live up to the same standards.
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We beat Woolwich.
I was there + fucking loved it!
He’s been an absolute gentleman & seems very honoured by his appointment. I genuinely like him as a bloke. Time will tell if he’s actually any good as a manager, & if he is the right fit for us. I was in the “no to Nuno” camp but am hopeful that given a little time he will prove many of us wrong. If he gets us top 6 this year and a cup final then I would be happy with this transitional season, particularly given Kane’s shameful antics which have been deeply undermining to our pre season.
Wasn’t particularly impressed with the appointment and haven’t been positive whatsoever with the season ahead, as I still don’t think currently we are good enough but the transfer window is still young. That being said, Nuno is a breath of fresh air. What an extremely likeable person this guy is. You can just tell the players will warm to him, which in Mourinho’s case it’s always half the team like him, half the team hate him. Nuno will 100% have the vast majority of board. I’m really liking the way he talks about the club too. Sounds like he’s really happy to be here.
Nuno has half a chance with Son and Kane (if we keep him for another year). He had Wolves playing well when he had a fit Jiminez and Jota. Needs another centre-half to be signed though.
Nuno has proved himself enough for us to trust him
Watching the training videos, he seems to have at least created a united and encouraged changing room without Kane.
That was the first training video I've watched in an age, starting to feel invested in the team again. That will do for me for starters.
This exactly. After Jose, it has been a joy to see the squad smiling again!
A team full of happy players who all play the game with a smile on their face is exactly what we need after the last 12 months.
Long piece but a must-read for Spurs fans. One of the most detailed profile manager pieces I've read.
Is Nuno really Jose Mourinho 2.0, or will his approach to managing Tottenham be totally different?
The same nationality, the same agent and, as of June when Nuno Espirito Santo took over at Tottenham Hotspur, Spurs head coaches past and present.
Ever since Nuno arrived in England with Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2017, he has had to field questions about Jose Mourinho.
With so much in common, and the fact Nuno was coached by Mourinho for two years at Porto, it’s been an easy comparison to make. And without doubt, Nuno is influenced by the man who led that Porto team to an unexpected Champions League win in 2004. Tight squads, developing a siege mentality, the tactical periodisation teachings of their compatriot Vitor Frade — these are all parts of the Nuno playbook.
“Jose Mourinho has an impact on me,” Nuno said in 2018. “I was a member of the squad in 2002-2003 and 2003-2004 at Porto. That will stay forever.”
But as much as they have qualities in common, the two men also have several profound differences. Nuno is in lots of ways, from his more reserved personality to his greater interest in sports science, Mourinho’s opposite.
“It’s a big misconception they’re similar,” says one source who knows both men well. “Off the pitch, they couldn’t be more different.”
Others point to their contrasting approach to the media as illustrative of how the two men diverge. Nuno the introvert, who at Wolves seemed to treat press conferences almost with disdain; Mourinho the extrovert, master of the soundbite.
Some of these perceptions may be overly simplistic, but as his predecessor at Tottenham and someone whose reign was ultimately a disappointment, it’s instructive to look at how Nuno compares with Mourinho.
Ahead of Nuno’s first competitive match as Spurs head coach at home to Manchester City on Sunday, a fixture Mourinho won 2-0 both times while he was in charge, The Athletic spoke to former colleagues and players to produce a proper evaluation of Tottenham’s new man.
In his previous job at Wolves, Nuno clearly had a fondness for Mourinho, but he grew tired of the constant questioning about his compatriot ahead of every time their teams met. He has cited the influence of Mourinho insisting that the Porto team always ate together and building “bonds of commitment”. And he has praised how Mourinho managed to keep the whole squad happy — including someone like Nuno, who as the second-choice goalkeeper rarely played. Mourinho even let Nuno take a penalty, which he scored, in a 7-0 Portuguese cup win against Varzim SC in 2003.
At Wolves, Nuno endeavoured and managed to do likewise with his squad — despite, or perhaps because of, rarely rotating what was a small, tight-knit group.
The ability to create a siege mentality and a perception of “us against the world” is also something Nuno learned from Mourinho. The Wolves players generally loved playing for Nuno, and fully bought into what the team was trying to achieve.
Nuno is a complex person. He speaks five languages (English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Russian) and like Mourinho is extremely intelligent. He has an aura around him that makes colleagues simultaneously respectful and fearful. “A strong and silent type,” as one source puts it. “A strict father figure,” says another.
But he can also be extremely charming. Because of a disappointing final season at Wolves where they finished 13th (with the significant caveats of an injury crisis, Diogo Jota’s departure and an exhausted squad following a 59-game, 383-day season that didn’t finish until August 11), it’s easy to forget how popular he was. Promotion to the Premier League, consecutive seventh-placed finishes, Europa League quarter-finals, FA Cup semis. And all the while connecting with the supporters by celebrating with them after victories, commiserating after defeats, and making them feel like they were all part of something bigger. He achieved something similar in his first season at Valencia too.
“He did that brilliantly, getting the fans on side,” says Phil Hayward, who worked with Nuno for two and a half years as Wolves’ head of medical before leaving for MLS side LA Galaxy. “Wolves were gutted he left. He’ll get that bond back between fans and players again at Tottenham. The fans will really take to him.”
Already the signs look positive, with Nuno seeming to connect with the crowd during Sunday’s 1-0 win over Woolwich. The fans cheered his name loudly when it was read out just before kick-off and after the game he posed for photos with fans and signed autographs — just as he did after Spurs’ other pre-season friendlies.
As a former Chelsea manager and the man who replaced the beloved Mauricio Pochettino, winning the supporters over was something that Mourinho always struggled with. Nuno by contrast has no such baggage and should have goodwill from the supporters given the challenges that have already been thrown at him, most notably the saga around Harry Kane’s future.
At Wolves, Nuno made a conscious effort to be more interactive with the fans, knowing that a failure to develop a rapport had contributed to the unpopularity of his predecessor Paul Lambert.
At Porto, Nuno had been more reserved on the touchlines, which is more in keeping with how he generally likes to operate. Unlike Mourinho, he is not someone who will often laugh and joke at the training ground. “He’s very quiet and could be seen as introverted,” says one source. “He only speaks when it’s necessary, which makes it more powerful.”
Mourinho was different. He loved to have a laugh and gossip with colleagues, and at away matches would make a point of speaking to opposition staff.
Nuno is not one for small talk and has a tight inner circle, and if you are outside of that it feels impenetrable.
Interestingly, this is something he shares with Mourinho. “With Jose, you have to be all or nothing, commit to him 100 per cent,” a former Manchester United staff member told The Athletic in April. “If you get his trust, you’re OK, but if not, then you’re outside that circle. He would make that judgment call very quickly, whether you’re with him or not.”
Returning to the Nuno inner circle, three of his most trusted advisors have joined him at Tottenham — assistant head coach Ian Cathro (formerly of Newcastle United and Hearts), goalkeeper coach Rui Barbosa and fitness coach Antonio Dias. There is a group of six whom Nuno has worked with in different combinations for all five of his management jobs.
He is someone you have to work hard for his respect and attention, but when you earn it it’s extremely rewarding.
“He was demanding but also very close to the players,” remembers Javi Fuego, a defensive midfielder under Nuno at Valencia. “It was obvious that he had been a player and understood different aspects of a player’s day-to-day life and how to get the best of us. With me, he showed a closeness and affection to help in difficult times.”
Other former colleagues think his sometimes dour-seeming personality is more to do with how obsessed he is with the job at hand. “He thinks about football the whole time,” says Hayward. “When people thought he was a bit dour and not very personable, he was deep in thought about the next game or training session. He is a very deep thinker.”
When the mood takes him, Nuno can also be lighthearted — but always on his own terms. “He could be quite funny, with an infectious smile and laugh,” says Hayward. “You knew he was in a good mood because you’d see his beaming smile across the room. Occasionally he would crack a joke with the players but most of the time he’d be so deep in his thoughts.”
At Valencia — where initially at least, Nuno was more affable (his bruising experience there and then as Porto manager are said to have made him more serious) — he could also have an occasional laugh with his players. “When the training was over or during the warm down he was friendly and fun,” says Fuego.
Generally, though, the Nuno of today is someone colleagues tread very carefully around. Knocking on his door to ask for an explanation of one of his decisions is said to be one of the worst things you can do. Nuno feels that if a player has not been selected they should understand his logic without it being explicitly laid out.
So far at Tottenham, the players have largely found him distant and uncommunicative outside of training sessions and matches. He is not a big fan of one-on-one meetings or even team meetings, preferring to put all of his energies into training sessions. At Wolves, even his closest colleagues knew that they would have to pick their moments to approach him.
With his players at Molineux, Nuno was known for quickly switching from, as my colleague Tim Spiers put it, “arm-around-the-shoulder jokiness to Malcolm Tucker-level bollocking mode”. When stressed he could dish out a tirade at someone at the training ground for what seemed like an innocuous offence.
Players never really knew where they stood with him (likewise at Spurs some of his players are unsure if he rates them), which is a trait also associated with Sir Alex Ferguson and, of course, Mourinho.
“Jose could have a laugh,” according to a former Manchester United staff member. “When the going was good he would come into a room bubbly and gregarious. Then, other times, he’d lose games and be the total opposite.”
As for Nuno, “You’re friends with him at times but he knows how to grill you,” Matt Doherty, now at Spurs, said in 2019. “We’ve all been on the end of one of them but the next day, he’ll give you a hug and he’ll talk to you. He’s got the blend perfect.”
By contrast, The Athletic reported in April that Doherty’s confidence had been shattered by Mourinho. The tone was set after Doherty’s debut against Everton last September, when Mourinho said: “I could also feel some of my players are not fit. Matt (Doherty) was struggling to play the way he plays, as an example.”
Some of Mourinho’s colleagues at Spurs felt that his dictatorial approach was out of step with modern management. Nuno and his staff are viewed as having a better balance of carrot and stick. “Every one of them was very positive and helped the players by being very positive with them,” remembers Fuego. “At Valencia, he managed to get all of us to give 100 per cent. Under Nuno, I gave perhaps the best level of my entire career.”
“Creating a siege mentality is so important to Nuno,” says Hayward. “He always talked about the strength of the pack, the strength of the wolf within the pack. Making sure it felt like it was us against the world, he really got the lads to buy into that. We were like a family unit.”
To help build that unit, Nuno insisted from as soon as he arrived at Wolves in 2017 that his team always ate lunch together and stayed at a hotel the night before every game, be it home or away. The importance of communal team meals was something that had stuck with him from Mourinho’s Porto.
Since taking over at Tottenham, Nuno has been encouraging during matches — even when players like Dele Alli have tried things and given the ball away, something he typically finds frustrating. Dele was a player Mourinho famously chastised for doing so in a Carabao Cup game against Stoke City. Mourinho could also be very affectionate towards his Spurs players, as Nuno was last week following the draw at Chelsea. Steven Bergwijn, for instance, was on the receiving end of a big hug (Nuno loves a hug) at the end of the game after scoring the equaliser.
Control is fundamental to Nuno. In pre-COVID times he would make a point of shaking the hands of everyone in the room, including the cameramen, before starting a press conference. It was his way of marking his territory.
Occasionally, such as during the first lockdown in March 2020, Nuno would even drop into the squad’s WhatsApp group to send encouraging messages. And in contrast to Mourinho, Nuno would never call a player out publicly. “If something wasn’t right, he’d let it be known in a one-on-one meeting or most likely a walk across the training pitch,” says Hayward.
One doubt that remains over Nuno is how he will do at Spurs dealing with some of the club’s bigger personalities. At Wolves, Nuno generally liked players who were young and wouldn’t stand up to him. “I do wonder how he’ll do with the bigger personalities,” says one source. “He never really had that at Wolves.
“Generally there he had young Portuguese players who would pretty much do what he asked of them with very little pushback, and he was pretty demanding.”
Dealing with big names is of course something his predecessor Mourinho had far more experience in. As is, and it’s important not to lose sight of this, winning trophies. For all Mourinho has been criticised in the last few years, that is something that for more than a decade he was a master at. Nuno by contrast has never led a team to a top-flight trophy and has only managed in the Champions League in two seasons (both of which ended in group-stage exits).
Silverware and a top-four finish are Tottenham’s targets this season. Though some feel that the two men’s contrasting pedigrees may actually help Nuno, since he arrives in north London with a point to prove, whereas Mourinho sometimes gave the impression that the job was beneath him. “Same coach, different players,” could be his Tottenham epitaph.
Away from the dressing room, Nuno loves playing golf and spending time with his family. He advocates living in “small circles” and suffered badly when he couldn’t see his family last year during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is said to have been revitalised by going back to Portugal to be with them this summer and this should be to Spurs’ benefit this season.
And both come from a country where tactics are paid a huge amount of attention. “It still amazes me that you watch any football analysis programme in Portugal and they spend at least half of the time talking about attacks rather than individual players,” says Tom Kundert, the Portugal correspondent for World Soccer magazine. “Tactics are almost everything here, so it’s more the Portuguese influence on Nuno than just Mourinho.
“Both come from the Portuguese school of adapting your team to the opposition, which some feel Mourinho has become too focused on in the last few years.”
Like Mourinho, a lot of Nuno’s focus is on how his team are set up without the ball. “Traditionally you are defending, you recover the ball, you counter-attack,” he said in March 2020. “But you can prepare where you recover the ball, who is going to recover the ball. You are determining the moment of your counter-attack. You can unbalance a team without the ball. I work a lot on that process.”
Nuno’s preference to sit in and see what their opponents had to offer meant that a recurring theme at Wolves was starting games slowly. In their 114 Premier League games under him, they scored almost twice as many goals in the second halves of matches as they did in first halves (87 to 47). The strong finishes were also down to how fit the team were — something Nuno said on Sunday he wants his Spurs team to emulate.
As Porto manager between 2016 and 2017, Nuno developed a similar reputation for playing conservatively. At Valencia, however, Nuno was celebrated for how entertaining his team was. And even at Wolves, the team played some extremely exciting football to win promotion and then beat the likes of Manchester City, Chelsea and Spurs as they twice finished seventh in the Premier League.
Those who know Nuno well say he is a pragmatist rather than an idealist like Mourinho, who will very rarely deviate from four at the back and playing on the counter. Nuno is not wedded to a particular style or system, but will select whatever suits the players best. The three at the back at Wolves was actually at odds with the back four he has used for almost all of his career — including so far at Tottenham.
“He’s way too intelligent to always play the same system,” says one source. “He’s shown how attacking he was at Valencia and then how he changed things around at Wolves. So even if he’s never shown he can manage a team with 70 per possession, he’s shown he can play with different systems. There’s no reason he can’t adapt to what suits Tottenham because he’s a very good coach.”
Whatever system he plays, Nuno is obsessed with shape, and letting each player know exactly what their roles will be for the game. What the Wolves players appreciated was how simple he made things seem, giving them two or three main tasks to focus on. And then if it was going wrong, Nuno would issue a short, clear message to try to correct it.
“From a tactical perspective he had a very specific way he wanted to play and was very clear that he wanted the lads to understand the approach from the outset,” Hayward remembers. “So the first pre-season training session would be very detailed with lots of tactically-orientated drills. There would be no flexibility within that, and if things weren’t right he’d stop them until they were.”
When looking at the type of system and approach Nuno has typically employed, the numbers paint an interesting picture.
At Wolves, it’s no surprise to see that Nuno used a back three for the most part, and a back four only 14 times.
At Porto and Valencia, however, Nuno almost always played with four at the back (exclusively so at Porto).
Revealingly, one of those occasions Nuno used a back three at Valencia was against the Champions League holders Real Madrid in a 2-1 home win, which Nuno cherishes as one of his finest tactical triumphs. A night when his defence, including Shkodran Mustafi and Nicolas Otamendi, got the better of Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale and Karim Benzema.
As a counterpoint, Mourinho has been more wedded to his preferred 4-2-3-1/4-3-3 over the last few years — illustrating that he is more about employing a specific system and asking the players to fit around it rather than the other way around. Mourinho was certainly attached to his 4-2-3-1 while at Tottenham.
It was a similar story at Manchester United.
As for how Nuno likes to approach games, something that stands out, especially last season, is how much he likes to keep control. It might have been that he knew the limitations of the attack so they stayed more compact as a unit, but looking at the number of possessions last season (ie, how many times the ball changed hands between the teams during the game), Wolves had the third-lowest average in the league (87.9 possessions per 90 minutes) behind Woolwich and Manchester City. Essentially, the games were not too frenetic compared with other teams in the league — Wolves perhaps allowing the opposition to have the ball where they felt there was not much danger. For context, Spurs were the eighth highest here with 92.8 possessions per 90. In general, Nuno is wary of wildcard players who take risks and end up giving the ball away — as explained in relation to Tanguy Ndombele earlier in the week.
As well as turnovers in possession, we can look at direct attacks as something of a proxy of a counter-attack. Direct attacks are “possessions that start in a team’s defensive half and result in a shot or touch inside the opposition penalty area within 15 seconds”. Spurs’ 2.7 direct attacks per 90 minutes was the sixth highest in the league last season, ahead of Wolves with 2.2 per 90 (11th highest).
These numbers suggest that Wolves last season were a little bit safer in and out of possession under Nuno, but that may have been down to issues like the Jota sale and the Raul Jimenez injury. In 2019-20, Wolves had their fourth-highest number of direct attacks — spearheaded by the thrilling trio of Jota, Jimenez and Adama Traore (Spurs fans will remember them combining extremely effectively on the counter in Wolves’ 3-2 win at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in March 2020).
Compare that with last season (below), and it’s clear how much less potent Wolves were without their previously two most important forwards.
For Spurs (see below), one alarming number from under Mourinho last season that jumps out is how slowly they attacked overall when they had the ball — the 14th quickest in the Premier League when advancing the ball in metres per second.
When trying to explain why Nuno is not an inherently defensive coach, it is instructive to look back at his time at Valencia. It was here that the side finished fourth in his first season with 77 points (the same number that Rafa Benitez achieved in winning La Liga with them in 2004) and for the first half of the season were arguably even better to watch than Barcelona and Real Madrid. The key, though, was how they married defensive shape with lightning-quick counter-attacks.
“We defended very well as a block,” Fuego explains. “It was difficult to score against us and we also had very fast and effective transitions. We were a very intense team.”
Valencia were comfortable playing out from the back and happy to have more possession than their opponents. Those watching say they remember it being very un-Mourinho like at the time.
A Guardian report in October 2014 after Valencia beat La Liga champions Atletico Madrid 3-1 to go briefly top of the table was fulsome in its praise of Nuno.
“Nuno is charismatic, open and energetic, and the results have been spectacular,” the article reads. “Players speak of a new, collective spirit, and there is a clarity about the way they play too — direct, aggressive, quick and intense. More Jurgen Klopp than Pep Guardiola or Jose Mourinho. Nuno wants his team to go straight for the throat.”
“The midfielders always pressure,” Nuno said after the game. “I want the team to always attack.”
At this point, seven games into the 2014-15 season, Nuno could do no wrong. Although his side couldn’t maintain a title bid, qualifying for the Champions League was a big achievement — even if the Portuguese was given a leg-up by the club investing heavily in transfers the previous summer. Having his close friend and agent Mendes so closely involved helped in this regard (more on that later). But with a fluid attack that included Paco Alcacer and Rodrigo (now at Leeds United) rotating between the false nine position and wide areas, Pablo Piatti on the left wing and a central midfield of Fuego, Dani Parejo and Andre Gomes (now at Everton), it was an exciting side. Alvaro Negredo could also add another dimension up front when Nuno wanted to be more attacking and play with two strikers.
It was a team that could hurt you in many ways and one that Nuno was constantly making small tweaks to, changing the system at half-time if needed. Of this flexibility and ability to change things midway through a game, one of his former players told The Athletic last year that: “(At half-time) he makes subtle changes. He may change the personnel, but more likely he’ll just hold a midfielder 10 yards deeper, or tell you to focus on a certain side of the pitch. They’re basic messages that make perfect sense when he says them.
“There are so many times after a game when you think what he said at half-time was absolutely correct and won us the match.”
It’s all about adaptability, and given this is something Nuno has shown himself capable of again and again, one can understand why his former colleagues bristled a bit at the suggestion he would simply rock up to Spurs and blindly employ a 3-4-3.
Mourinho met Frade when working with the Vitoria de Setubal academy in the early 1990s and they remained in contact for the next 10 years or so. Mourinho was viewed as a revolutionary when he came to England in 2004, merging all the different forms of training and insisting that everything was done with the ball. Mourinho’s sessions were about preparing his players for the rigours of a match and so his sessions always lasted 90 minutes — or 120 minutes if he was preparing his squad for a match that might involve extra time.
Nuno shares Mourinho’s belief in tactical periodisation and everything about the way his team train is geared towards replicating what the players will face on match days. “Nuno makes sure that having the right shape in training is there in everything they do,” says Hayward. “So even the warm-up might be in that particular shape to make sure players have a really good sense of where they should be.”
Nuno and Mourinho’s ideology may be broadly the same but the way they operate during training sessions is very different. And this has been one of the biggest differences the players have noticed since Nuno took over.
Where many of the squad felt undercooked and under coached during Mourinho’s sessions, they have been worked extremely hard under Nuno. Double sessions have been a regular feature of pre-season and Nuno is very hands-on at Hotspur Way. He likes to stand by the goals to get the best view and will frequently interrupt if there is something that is not quite to his liking. Everything has to be done to the highest standards.
It’s on the training pitch that he comes alive and does the vast majority of his talking with his players. His sessions are said to be varied and enjoyable for the players, even if he is very preoccupied with team shape.
But players are certainly not complaining that they don’t feel fully pushed now. “Under Nuno, you train really hard,” Fuego says. “He is very intense and takes an active part in the sessions, demanding the player’s full attention throughout.”
Other former Nuno players use words like “relentless” and emphasise how well-drilled they were. His Wolves captain Conor Coady explained last year that Nuno also has some pet hates that players must learn to avoid. “When we’re on the training pitch, he’s speaking in the middle, it gets to him a bit when your hands are on your hips, because you’re not ready,” Coady said.
“He’ll say, ‘You’re not ready, get your hands off your hips’. You could be in formation, he could be in the middle of the pitch talking to you… I’ve been done for it when he first came in: you’re stood with your hands on your hips listening and it’s, ‘Take your hands off your hips, you’re not ready’. When he first came in it shocked us a little bit, but we understand what he’s saying.
“You’re thinking about everything. You’re always thinking about what he’s saying.”
Where the latter still prefers the eye test and to rely on his instincts, Nuno is one of the most cutting-edge managers in the Premier League. His trust in experts in the field explains the extraordinary injury record Wolves enjoyed in their first two seasons in the Premier League. They suffered just five in 2018-19 (setting a Premier League record for squad availability of 98.5 per cent) and then the following season, despite competing in 59 games across 383 days, used only 21 players in the Premier League — fewer than any team.
Hayward, Wolves’ head of medical for the majority of those two seasons, says Nuno put his complete trust in fitness coach Antonio Dias (who has joined him at Tottenham) and he played a major role in “revolutionising everything we did at Wolves”.
They moved away from traditional British customs. Hayward recalls that before Nuno arrived, Wolves had employed a traditional strength and conditioning approach where players would lift heavy weights in the gym. Nuno and Dias instantly changed that.
“The first time I met Nuno and gave him a tour of the training ground, he said, ‘We’re not weightlifters, we’re a football club. We don’t need these heavy weights’,” Hayward says. “Straight away they brought in a lot of new equipment that used a different type of methodology from a strength and conditioning perspective.
“We started to use things like flywheels and pulleys to generate resistance rather than weights. It meant players could work in the gym in a very functional way, doing lots of movements they would do in training or matches but with some resistance overload through these machines as opposed to doing more linear activities like squatting, which isn’t quite so functional.
“The players bought into that. As a result, they did the sessions really well, and we saw the benefits from a physical output perspective but also an injury prevention perspective. We had very few hamstring injuries at all — three in three years. Our availability rate was always very high because we got the guys working in such a way that they were very robust and resilient, and then the way the guys operated on the pitch was very scientific in terms of load management.”
Wolves became fitter and fitter, routinely winning matches in the second half of games. In the space of three weeks in December 2019 and January 2020, they twice came back from 2-0 down to win 3-2 — against Manchester City and then Southampton. Tottenham by contrast threw away the joint second-most points from winning positions last season (23) of any team in the Premier League.
By bringing Dias with him to Spurs, Nuno will employ a similarly scientific approach and as he said on Sunday, he hopes to see similar results.
“Antonio worked the players very hard,” Hayward says, “But the players became used to working that way and became very robust, and he was very good at looking at their physical output with the GPS metrics and working with Nuno to plan sessions to make sure the players were being worked very hard but were not being overworked, and also never being underloaded.
“If you have a period when players aren’t working so hard and then suddenly you increase the workload you can have injuries. What we did was have the training load consistently very high, and that allowed us to keep them fit.”
These sorts of mistakes have allegedly been made by Mourinho over the last few years. He is famously suspicious of GPS tracking technology and is said to have been reactive when it came to managing his players’ physical load. “He would just say the players need to work harder if things were not going well. Likewise, if things were going great then they might train a bit lighter,” a source says. “I got the impression Mourinho wasn’t the most sports science-driven coach out there.”
At United, Mourinho preferred to trust anecdotal evidence, particularly on injuries. My colleague Laurie Whitwell explained in depth in April how Mourinho gutted much of United’s sports science department. He also marginalised key members of the club’s sports science staff like Tony Strudwick, and the numbers paint a bleak picture of how this affected his team.
The below shows how Mourinho’s United stopped being able to win the ball high up the pitch.
At Spurs, Mourinho’s team came nowhere near to recreating the ferocity of the press of the peak Pochettino team.
“Nothing shows how much the picture has changed with Mourinho like how little his teams run compared with before,” says Simon Brundish, a sports science consultant for the Football Association.
“In 2002 the average Premier League team would run about 85 kilometres a game. Mourinho arrived with tactical periodisation in 2004 and his team ran about 98 kilometres — they blew everyone else out the water.
“Come 2015 the rest of the league was now running far more than that a game because of advances in sports sciences and changes of demographics. But Mourinho was still training teams to run at around 98 kilometres. Hence the change in result. Suddenly his teams aren’t fit compared to other teams. He’s replaced at United by Ole Gunnar Solskjaer who comes in and says we’re going to press, and the team just breaks.
“At Spurs, it was the same — they were physical monsters under Pochettino, battling with Liverpool to cover the most high-speed distance per game. That plummeted under Mourinho. They were nothing compared to where they were before.
“Nuno is the opposite — he likes tactical periodisation but loves sports science, and Wolves had a phenomenal injury record. Especially in that first Premier League season, there were barely any soft tissue injuries.”
Mourinho’s approach to injuries is different — he likes for his players to play through the pain. Like Son Heung-min when he was recovering from a fractured forearm in February 2020 (when he, jokingly perhaps, wondered if he still might be available) or the time Ben Davies suffered a calf injury when not fully fit against Aston Villa in March after defeats by Woolwich and Dinamo Zagreb. “When a player plays injured to help his team recover from two bad defeats, this can happen,” Mourinho wrote about Davies on Instagram. “A man, a team player.”
“He didn’t like players who were injured,” a source at United told The Athletic in April. “You can see it in the way he behaves on the touchline. He wants players to get up and carry on.”
Nuno’s approach to injury prevention is different. He doesn’t like players missing training with minor issues but that’s because he feels that the sessions are so critical to what he is trying to achieve — if they do miss sessions in the week they are unlikely to play at the weekend (let’s see if that applies to Kane this Sunday). And as much as possible, even rehab work should not be done separately from the training sessions.
Linked to this, Hayward remembers a lightbulb moment when Nuno explained why even partially injured players would be better off joining training sessions. “Nuno would be happy to accommodate players with slight fitness issues to get them back into training quicker,” Hayward recalls. “I remember having a good conversation with him when one of our players had a hamstring problem and I said, ‘He’s not ready, he’s not sprinting yet’.
“Nuno explained that the player in question hardly sprinted during training anyway and barely sprints maximally during a game so why do we want him to sprint maximally with you two weeks before he’s going to play in a game anyway? He said that it was much better to get him back in with the group doing the last stages of his rehab there rather than doing it separately to the team with a rehab coach or one of the sports science staff.
“He said he’d look after him in the session, and plan it around him a bit to make sure we can protect him. That was quite a novel approach but was a good point and he’s right. We knew from his stats that this player only sprints six or seven times a game.”
Nuno and his team were always across the details of every player at Wolves, with a thought-out methodology about how they structured each individual’s programme.
Away from injury prevention, nothing was left to chance. Nuno hired a nutritionist and chef as soon as he arrived at Wolves. Other reforms were introduced, like players wearing special glasses before evening games to acclimatise. Julio Figueroa, a psychologist from the University of Barcelona, was brought in as a mind coach. He worked one on one psychologically with the players — it’s understood he helped Traore a lot — and instigated sleep sessions during the middle of the day. Figueroa would get the players in a circle and send them to sleep like a hypnotist. He explained that a nap of roughly 20 minutes would do wonders for an athlete’s rehabilitation and recovery between matches.
The importance of sleep was also why Nuno wanted his Wolves players to live close to the club’s Compton Park training ground. So that they had time to go home and have a quick nap in between double sessions.
The players embraced the fitness and nutritional ideas because they could see the benefits on the pitch. At Spurs, Nuno knows he will be similarly judged on his results but there is goodwill from the players after often feeling unprepared under Mourinho.
It should be said first of all that Nuno and Mendes are far closer than Mourinho and Mendes. In fact, they are so close that their careers have been almost inextricably linked. At all of Nuno’s managerial jobs before Spurs, his clubs signed Mendes players — many of whom, especially at Wolves, would not have joined were it not for the agent’s connections.
Nuno met the agent at a nightclub Mendes owned in 1997, and the goalkeeper’s £720,000 move to Deportivo La Coruna was his first major deal. The pair have remained close friends ever since.
Back in Portugal, Nuno’s closeness to Mendes affects how his achievements are viewed. “Nuno did a really good job at Rio Ave in his first managerial job (finishing seventh in his first season and reaching both cup finals in his second),” Kundert says. “But Nuno has always been viewed slightly differently as a manager because of his connections with Mendes. It’s like he has to doubly prove himself because of the perception that he has had some very good players thanks to Mendes.”
Nuno has always been public in his praise for Mendes. Upon reaching one of those cup finals at Rio Ave he answered the phone to his agent ahead of the press conference starting and said “this is for you, this is for you”. When he left Valencia after a tumultuous period off the pitch, Nuno said in his farewell address: “He (Mendes) remains the best agent in the world. He has helped Valencia a lot.
“The players he has brought, I believe they will soon be the best in the world. You must recognise his work.”
Mourinho and Mendes’s relationship has never been anything like as public, and during the former’s most successful period, he did not sign a huge number of Mendes clients. This changed to an extent at Tottenham, with Doherty bought for £15 million, and Gedson Fernandes and Carlos Vinicius both arriving on loan. None of that trio could be described as a big success, and it meant that fans were sceptical towards the club hiring another Mendes client as head coach. Especially as another from the Gestifute stable, Gennaro Gattuso, also came close to getting the job and Mendes has a good relationship with recently appointed managing director of football Fabio Paratici.
But where Nuno’s previous three clubs were part of what some in Portugal describe as the “Mendes carousel” of teams that frequently trade his players, Spurs do not fit into that category. They have not signed a Mendes player this summer and sources close to the club dismiss the idea that anyone could influence chairman Daniel Levy in that way. As for Paratici, the Italian gets on well with pretty much every major player in the footballing world.
For Nuno though, Mendes has been a significant part of his career. English football supporters know about Mendes’ influence at Wolves, but it was at Valencia where the relationship played out most publicly.
Mendes had close connections with Peter Lim, who took over as owner of Valencia in 2014. Before him actually becoming the majority shareholder in the October, he had a say in Nuno becoming head coach that summer.
Given he had only previously managed at Rio Ave, a middling Portuguese team, Nuno appeared far too inexperienced for such a big job. But for the first season at least, the appointment seemed a very shrewd one. Though it’s worth remembering that vast sums were spent on players during Nuno’s 16 months in charge, including a dollop of Mendes clients like Gomes, Rodrigo, Joao Cancelo (now at Manchester City), and Enzo Perez — all of whom joined the club from Benfica during this period.
But despite that impressive first season, off the pitch a civil war was erupting over how the club was being run (the full story was outlined in November by The Athletic’s Dermot Corrigan). The row eventually led to Valencia legends Francisco Rufete (sporting director) and Roberto Ayala (club secretary) leaving the club in the summer of 2015, leading supporters to quickly turn on Lim, Mendes and, by association, Nuno.
When results were slow the following season, amid criticism of the performances of some of Mendes’ clients, the fans took their frustrations out on Nuno. The hostility was such that he resigned in November 2015 after a 1-0 home defeat by Sevilla. It was then, just before he was replaced by Gary Neville that he publicly praised Mendes.
After a period at Porto, another club with close links to Mendes, Nuno joined another one in Wolves. Staff at the Midlands club bristle at the suggestion that Mendes has undue influence at Molineux, but there is no denying the high number of his clients that have joined the club since the Chinese conglomerate Fosun that he has a close relationship with took over the club in 2016. In his season in the Championship, for instance, Nuno could call upon the sublime talents of Mendes clients like Ruben Neves and Jota.
It became customary for Wolves to sign Mendes clients over whichever targets others at the club put forward. Last January for instance, they brought in winger Daniel Podence over Dani Olmo, who ended up impressing for Spain at this summer’s Euro 2020.
In general, Nuno benefitted from the preponderance of Mendes clients he got to work with while at Wolves, but over his last year at the club that started to change a bit. Podence for instance has not been a big success, while the signing of right-back Nelson Semedo from Barcelona in a deal worth potentially up to almost £37 million does not so far look like money well spent.
While at Wolves, Nuno was happy to defer issues of recruitment to those who were paid to make those decisions. He is very much a head coach and is focused on training and improving the players, so is not expected to be bothered by the fact that Spurs’ recruitment will operate differently from at Molineux. Mourinho generally wanted more of a say in which players his clubs signed, and had several contacts in foreign markets whose judgment he trusted.
So after all this, the main question remains: can Nuno prove himself to be different from Mourinho in one key area, making a success of the Spurs head coach role?
As we head towards his first competitive match on Sunday, there appears to largely be goodwill towards the new man. He has been a dignified presence so far and his calmness when interviewed has been welcomed after the psychodrama of Mourinho’s time in charge.
His former colleagues are certainly backing him to “prove a few people wrong” and perhaps the swirling angst around Kane will help him create that siege mentality he likes.
“Will he succeed at Spurs? I hope so!” says his midfield general from Valencia, Fuego. “I think it’s his time and he’s ready.”
Ready to end the Mourinho comparisons once and for all.
Is Nuno really Jose Mourinho 2.0, or will his approach to managing Tottenham be totally different?
The same nationality, the same agent and, as of June when Nuno Espirito Santo took over at Tottenham Hotspur, Spurs head coaches past and present.
Ever since Nuno arrived in England with Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2017, he has had to field questions about Jose Mourinho.
With so much in common, and the fact Nuno was coached by Mourinho for two years at Porto, it’s been an easy comparison to make. And without doubt, Nuno is influenced by the man who led that Porto team to an unexpected Champions League win in 2004. Tight squads, developing a siege mentality, the tactical periodisation teachings of their compatriot Vitor Frade — these are all parts of the Nuno playbook.
“Jose Mourinho has an impact on me,” Nuno said in 2018. “I was a member of the squad in 2002-2003 and 2003-2004 at Porto. That will stay forever.”
But as much as they have qualities in common, the two men also have several profound differences. Nuno is in lots of ways, from his more reserved personality to his greater interest in sports science, Mourinho’s opposite.
“It’s a big misconception they’re similar,” says one source who knows both men well. “Off the pitch, they couldn’t be more different.”
Others point to their contrasting approach to the media as illustrative of how the two men diverge. Nuno the introvert, who at Wolves seemed to treat press conferences almost with disdain; Mourinho the extrovert, master of the soundbite.
Some of these perceptions may be overly simplistic, but as his predecessor at Tottenham and someone whose reign was ultimately a disappointment, it’s instructive to look at how Nuno compares with Mourinho.
Ahead of Nuno’s first competitive match as Spurs head coach at home to Manchester City on Sunday, a fixture Mourinho won 2-0 both times while he was in charge, The Athletic spoke to former colleagues and players to produce a proper evaluation of Tottenham’s new man.
Personality and man-management
At his unveiling press conference at Spurs, Nuno said that he had not spoken to Mourinho since taking the job — aware perhaps that most supporters wanted a clean break from the immediate past.In his previous job at Wolves, Nuno clearly had a fondness for Mourinho, but he grew tired of the constant questioning about his compatriot ahead of every time their teams met. He has cited the influence of Mourinho insisting that the Porto team always ate together and building “bonds of commitment”. And he has praised how Mourinho managed to keep the whole squad happy — including someone like Nuno, who as the second-choice goalkeeper rarely played. Mourinho even let Nuno take a penalty, which he scored, in a 7-0 Portuguese cup win against Varzim SC in 2003.
At Wolves, Nuno endeavoured and managed to do likewise with his squad — despite, or perhaps because of, rarely rotating what was a small, tight-knit group.
The ability to create a siege mentality and a perception of “us against the world” is also something Nuno learned from Mourinho. The Wolves players generally loved playing for Nuno, and fully bought into what the team was trying to achieve.
Nuno is a complex person. He speaks five languages (English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Russian) and like Mourinho is extremely intelligent. He has an aura around him that makes colleagues simultaneously respectful and fearful. “A strong and silent type,” as one source puts it. “A strict father figure,” says another.
But he can also be extremely charming. Because of a disappointing final season at Wolves where they finished 13th (with the significant caveats of an injury crisis, Diogo Jota’s departure and an exhausted squad following a 59-game, 383-day season that didn’t finish until August 11), it’s easy to forget how popular he was. Promotion to the Premier League, consecutive seventh-placed finishes, Europa League quarter-finals, FA Cup semis. And all the while connecting with the supporters by celebrating with them after victories, commiserating after defeats, and making them feel like they were all part of something bigger. He achieved something similar in his first season at Valencia too.
“He did that brilliantly, getting the fans on side,” says Phil Hayward, who worked with Nuno for two and a half years as Wolves’ head of medical before leaving for MLS side LA Galaxy. “Wolves were gutted he left. He’ll get that bond back between fans and players again at Tottenham. The fans will really take to him.”
Already the signs look positive, with Nuno seeming to connect with the crowd during Sunday’s 1-0 win over Woolwich. The fans cheered his name loudly when it was read out just before kick-off and after the game he posed for photos with fans and signed autographs — just as he did after Spurs’ other pre-season friendlies.
As a former Chelsea manager and the man who replaced the beloved Mauricio Pochettino, winning the supporters over was something that Mourinho always struggled with. Nuno by contrast has no such baggage and should have goodwill from the supporters given the challenges that have already been thrown at him, most notably the saga around Harry Kane’s future.
At Wolves, Nuno made a conscious effort to be more interactive with the fans, knowing that a failure to develop a rapport had contributed to the unpopularity of his predecessor Paul Lambert.
At Porto, Nuno had been more reserved on the touchlines, which is more in keeping with how he generally likes to operate. Unlike Mourinho, he is not someone who will often laugh and joke at the training ground. “He’s very quiet and could be seen as introverted,” says one source. “He only speaks when it’s necessary, which makes it more powerful.”
Mourinho was different. He loved to have a laugh and gossip with colleagues, and at away matches would make a point of speaking to opposition staff.
Nuno is not one for small talk and has a tight inner circle, and if you are outside of that it feels impenetrable.
Interestingly, this is something he shares with Mourinho. “With Jose, you have to be all or nothing, commit to him 100 per cent,” a former Manchester United staff member told The Athletic in April. “If you get his trust, you’re OK, but if not, then you’re outside that circle. He would make that judgment call very quickly, whether you’re with him or not.”
Returning to the Nuno inner circle, three of his most trusted advisors have joined him at Tottenham — assistant head coach Ian Cathro (formerly of Newcastle United and Hearts), goalkeeper coach Rui Barbosa and fitness coach Antonio Dias. There is a group of six whom Nuno has worked with in different combinations for all five of his management jobs.
He is someone you have to work hard for his respect and attention, but when you earn it it’s extremely rewarding.
“He was demanding but also very close to the players,” remembers Javi Fuego, a defensive midfielder under Nuno at Valencia. “It was obvious that he had been a player and understood different aspects of a player’s day-to-day life and how to get the best of us. With me, he showed a closeness and affection to help in difficult times.”
Other former colleagues think his sometimes dour-seeming personality is more to do with how obsessed he is with the job at hand. “He thinks about football the whole time,” says Hayward. “When people thought he was a bit dour and not very personable, he was deep in thought about the next game or training session. He is a very deep thinker.”
When the mood takes him, Nuno can also be lighthearted — but always on his own terms. “He could be quite funny, with an infectious smile and laugh,” says Hayward. “You knew he was in a good mood because you’d see his beaming smile across the room. Occasionally he would crack a joke with the players but most of the time he’d be so deep in his thoughts.”
At Valencia — where initially at least, Nuno was more affable (his bruising experience there and then as Porto manager are said to have made him more serious) — he could also have an occasional laugh with his players. “When the training was over or during the warm down he was friendly and fun,” says Fuego.
Generally, though, the Nuno of today is someone colleagues tread very carefully around. Knocking on his door to ask for an explanation of one of his decisions is said to be one of the worst things you can do. Nuno feels that if a player has not been selected they should understand his logic without it being explicitly laid out.
So far at Tottenham, the players have largely found him distant and uncommunicative outside of training sessions and matches. He is not a big fan of one-on-one meetings or even team meetings, preferring to put all of his energies into training sessions. At Wolves, even his closest colleagues knew that they would have to pick their moments to approach him.
With his players at Molineux, Nuno was known for quickly switching from, as my colleague Tim Spiers put it, “arm-around-the-shoulder jokiness to Malcolm Tucker-level bollocking mode”. When stressed he could dish out a tirade at someone at the training ground for what seemed like an innocuous offence.
Players never really knew where they stood with him (likewise at Spurs some of his players are unsure if he rates them), which is a trait also associated with Sir Alex Ferguson and, of course, Mourinho.
“Jose could have a laugh,” according to a former Manchester United staff member. “When the going was good he would come into a room bubbly and gregarious. Then, other times, he’d lose games and be the total opposite.”
As for Nuno, “You’re friends with him at times but he knows how to grill you,” Matt Doherty, now at Spurs, said in 2019. “We’ve all been on the end of one of them but the next day, he’ll give you a hug and he’ll talk to you. He’s got the blend perfect.”
By contrast, The Athletic reported in April that Doherty’s confidence had been shattered by Mourinho. The tone was set after Doherty’s debut against Everton last September, when Mourinho said: “I could also feel some of my players are not fit. Matt (Doherty) was struggling to play the way he plays, as an example.”
Some of Mourinho’s colleagues at Spurs felt that his dictatorial approach was out of step with modern management. Nuno and his staff are viewed as having a better balance of carrot and stick. “Every one of them was very positive and helped the players by being very positive with them,” remembers Fuego. “At Valencia, he managed to get all of us to give 100 per cent. Under Nuno, I gave perhaps the best level of my entire career.”
“Creating a siege mentality is so important to Nuno,” says Hayward. “He always talked about the strength of the pack, the strength of the wolf within the pack. Making sure it felt like it was us against the world, he really got the lads to buy into that. We were like a family unit.”
To help build that unit, Nuno insisted from as soon as he arrived at Wolves in 2017 that his team always ate lunch together and stayed at a hotel the night before every game, be it home or away. The importance of communal team meals was something that had stuck with him from Mourinho’s Porto.
Since taking over at Tottenham, Nuno has been encouraging during matches — even when players like Dele Alli have tried things and given the ball away, something he typically finds frustrating. Dele was a player Mourinho famously chastised for doing so in a Carabao Cup game against Stoke City. Mourinho could also be very affectionate towards his Spurs players, as Nuno was last week following the draw at Chelsea. Steven Bergwijn, for instance, was on the receiving end of a big hug (Nuno loves a hug) at the end of the game after scoring the equaliser.
Control is fundamental to Nuno. In pre-COVID times he would make a point of shaking the hands of everyone in the room, including the cameramen, before starting a press conference. It was his way of marking his territory.
Occasionally, such as during the first lockdown in March 2020, Nuno would even drop into the squad’s WhatsApp group to send encouraging messages. And in contrast to Mourinho, Nuno would never call a player out publicly. “If something wasn’t right, he’d let it be known in a one-on-one meeting or most likely a walk across the training pitch,” says Hayward.
One doubt that remains over Nuno is how he will do at Spurs dealing with some of the club’s bigger personalities. At Wolves, Nuno generally liked players who were young and wouldn’t stand up to him. “I do wonder how he’ll do with the bigger personalities,” says one source. “He never really had that at Wolves.
“Generally there he had young Portuguese players who would pretty much do what he asked of them with very little pushback, and he was pretty demanding.”
Dealing with big names is of course something his predecessor Mourinho had far more experience in. As is, and it’s important not to lose sight of this, winning trophies. For all Mourinho has been criticised in the last few years, that is something that for more than a decade he was a master at. Nuno by contrast has never led a team to a top-flight trophy and has only managed in the Champions League in two seasons (both of which ended in group-stage exits).
Silverware and a top-four finish are Tottenham’s targets this season. Though some feel that the two men’s contrasting pedigrees may actually help Nuno, since he arrives in north London with a point to prove, whereas Mourinho sometimes gave the impression that the job was beneath him. “Same coach, different players,” could be his Tottenham epitaph.
Away from the dressing room, Nuno loves playing golf and spending time with his family. He advocates living in “small circles” and suffered badly when he couldn’t see his family last year during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is said to have been revitalised by going back to Portugal to be with them this summer and this should be to Spurs’ benefit this season.
Tactical approach
Tactics are one of the areas where Nuno and Mourinho are most frequently compared. Both are seen as reactive coaches who like to play on the counter-attack.And both come from a country where tactics are paid a huge amount of attention. “It still amazes me that you watch any football analysis programme in Portugal and they spend at least half of the time talking about attacks rather than individual players,” says Tom Kundert, the Portugal correspondent for World Soccer magazine. “Tactics are almost everything here, so it’s more the Portuguese influence on Nuno than just Mourinho.
“Both come from the Portuguese school of adapting your team to the opposition, which some feel Mourinho has become too focused on in the last few years.”
Like Mourinho, a lot of Nuno’s focus is on how his team are set up without the ball. “Traditionally you are defending, you recover the ball, you counter-attack,” he said in March 2020. “But you can prepare where you recover the ball, who is going to recover the ball. You are determining the moment of your counter-attack. You can unbalance a team without the ball. I work a lot on that process.”
Nuno’s preference to sit in and see what their opponents had to offer meant that a recurring theme at Wolves was starting games slowly. In their 114 Premier League games under him, they scored almost twice as many goals in the second halves of matches as they did in first halves (87 to 47). The strong finishes were also down to how fit the team were — something Nuno said on Sunday he wants his Spurs team to emulate.
As Porto manager between 2016 and 2017, Nuno developed a similar reputation for playing conservatively. At Valencia, however, Nuno was celebrated for how entertaining his team was. And even at Wolves, the team played some extremely exciting football to win promotion and then beat the likes of Manchester City, Chelsea and Spurs as they twice finished seventh in the Premier League.
Those who know Nuno well say he is a pragmatist rather than an idealist like Mourinho, who will very rarely deviate from four at the back and playing on the counter. Nuno is not wedded to a particular style or system, but will select whatever suits the players best. The three at the back at Wolves was actually at odds with the back four he has used for almost all of his career — including so far at Tottenham.
“He’s way too intelligent to always play the same system,” says one source. “He’s shown how attacking he was at Valencia and then how he changed things around at Wolves. So even if he’s never shown he can manage a team with 70 per possession, he’s shown he can play with different systems. There’s no reason he can’t adapt to what suits Tottenham because he’s a very good coach.”
Whatever system he plays, Nuno is obsessed with shape, and letting each player know exactly what their roles will be for the game. What the Wolves players appreciated was how simple he made things seem, giving them two or three main tasks to focus on. And then if it was going wrong, Nuno would issue a short, clear message to try to correct it.
“From a tactical perspective he had a very specific way he wanted to play and was very clear that he wanted the lads to understand the approach from the outset,” Hayward remembers. “So the first pre-season training session would be very detailed with lots of tactically-orientated drills. There would be no flexibility within that, and if things weren’t right he’d stop them until they were.”
When looking at the type of system and approach Nuno has typically employed, the numbers paint an interesting picture.
At Wolves, it’s no surprise to see that Nuno used a back three for the most part, and a back four only 14 times.
At Porto and Valencia, however, Nuno almost always played with four at the back (exclusively so at Porto).
Revealingly, one of those occasions Nuno used a back three at Valencia was against the Champions League holders Real Madrid in a 2-1 home win, which Nuno cherishes as one of his finest tactical triumphs. A night when his defence, including Shkodran Mustafi and Nicolas Otamendi, got the better of Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale and Karim Benzema.
As a counterpoint, Mourinho has been more wedded to his preferred 4-2-3-1/4-3-3 over the last few years — illustrating that he is more about employing a specific system and asking the players to fit around it rather than the other way around. Mourinho was certainly attached to his 4-2-3-1 while at Tottenham.
It was a similar story at Manchester United.
As for how Nuno likes to approach games, something that stands out, especially last season, is how much he likes to keep control. It might have been that he knew the limitations of the attack so they stayed more compact as a unit, but looking at the number of possessions last season (ie, how many times the ball changed hands between the teams during the game), Wolves had the third-lowest average in the league (87.9 possessions per 90 minutes) behind Woolwich and Manchester City. Essentially, the games were not too frenetic compared with other teams in the league — Wolves perhaps allowing the opposition to have the ball where they felt there was not much danger. For context, Spurs were the eighth highest here with 92.8 possessions per 90. In general, Nuno is wary of wildcard players who take risks and end up giving the ball away — as explained in relation to Tanguy Ndombele earlier in the week.
As well as turnovers in possession, we can look at direct attacks as something of a proxy of a counter-attack. Direct attacks are “possessions that start in a team’s defensive half and result in a shot or touch inside the opposition penalty area within 15 seconds”. Spurs’ 2.7 direct attacks per 90 minutes was the sixth highest in the league last season, ahead of Wolves with 2.2 per 90 (11th highest).
These numbers suggest that Wolves last season were a little bit safer in and out of possession under Nuno, but that may have been down to issues like the Jota sale and the Raul Jimenez injury. In 2019-20, Wolves had their fourth-highest number of direct attacks — spearheaded by the thrilling trio of Jota, Jimenez and Adama Traore (Spurs fans will remember them combining extremely effectively on the counter in Wolves’ 3-2 win at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in March 2020).
Compare that with last season (below), and it’s clear how much less potent Wolves were without their previously two most important forwards.
For Spurs (see below), one alarming number from under Mourinho last season that jumps out is how slowly they attacked overall when they had the ball — the 14th quickest in the Premier League when advancing the ball in metres per second.
When trying to explain why Nuno is not an inherently defensive coach, it is instructive to look back at his time at Valencia. It was here that the side finished fourth in his first season with 77 points (the same number that Rafa Benitez achieved in winning La Liga with them in 2004) and for the first half of the season were arguably even better to watch than Barcelona and Real Madrid. The key, though, was how they married defensive shape with lightning-quick counter-attacks.
“We defended very well as a block,” Fuego explains. “It was difficult to score against us and we also had very fast and effective transitions. We were a very intense team.”
Valencia were comfortable playing out from the back and happy to have more possession than their opponents. Those watching say they remember it being very un-Mourinho like at the time.
A Guardian report in October 2014 after Valencia beat La Liga champions Atletico Madrid 3-1 to go briefly top of the table was fulsome in its praise of Nuno.
“Nuno is charismatic, open and energetic, and the results have been spectacular,” the article reads. “Players speak of a new, collective spirit, and there is a clarity about the way they play too — direct, aggressive, quick and intense. More Jurgen Klopp than Pep Guardiola or Jose Mourinho. Nuno wants his team to go straight for the throat.”
“The midfielders always pressure,” Nuno said after the game. “I want the team to always attack.”
At this point, seven games into the 2014-15 season, Nuno could do no wrong. Although his side couldn’t maintain a title bid, qualifying for the Champions League was a big achievement — even if the Portuguese was given a leg-up by the club investing heavily in transfers the previous summer. Having his close friend and agent Mendes so closely involved helped in this regard (more on that later). But with a fluid attack that included Paco Alcacer and Rodrigo (now at Leeds United) rotating between the false nine position and wide areas, Pablo Piatti on the left wing and a central midfield of Fuego, Dani Parejo and Andre Gomes (now at Everton), it was an exciting side. Alvaro Negredo could also add another dimension up front when Nuno wanted to be more attacking and play with two strikers.
It was a team that could hurt you in many ways and one that Nuno was constantly making small tweaks to, changing the system at half-time if needed. Of this flexibility and ability to change things midway through a game, one of his former players told The Athletic last year that: “(At half-time) he makes subtle changes. He may change the personnel, but more likely he’ll just hold a midfielder 10 yards deeper, or tell you to focus on a certain side of the pitch. They’re basic messages that make perfect sense when he says them.
“There are so many times after a game when you think what he said at half-time was absolutely correct and won us the match.”
It’s all about adaptability, and given this is something Nuno has shown himself capable of again and again, one can understand why his former colleagues bristled a bit at the suggestion he would simply rock up to Spurs and blindly employ a 3-4-3.
Training
In a broad sense, Nuno and Mourinho share the same key principles about how to train. They are both disciples of their compatriot Vitor Frade, a professor of physical education and philosophy at the University of Porto. It was Frade who pioneered the coaching approach known as “tactical periodisation”, which originated in Porto. The idea was to completely reject the notion that the physical, technical, tactical and mental elements of football should be trained individually.Mourinho met Frade when working with the Vitoria de Setubal academy in the early 1990s and they remained in contact for the next 10 years or so. Mourinho was viewed as a revolutionary when he came to England in 2004, merging all the different forms of training and insisting that everything was done with the ball. Mourinho’s sessions were about preparing his players for the rigours of a match and so his sessions always lasted 90 minutes — or 120 minutes if he was preparing his squad for a match that might involve extra time.
Nuno shares Mourinho’s belief in tactical periodisation and everything about the way his team train is geared towards replicating what the players will face on match days. “Nuno makes sure that having the right shape in training is there in everything they do,” says Hayward. “So even the warm-up might be in that particular shape to make sure players have a really good sense of where they should be.”
Nuno and Mourinho’s ideology may be broadly the same but the way they operate during training sessions is very different. And this has been one of the biggest differences the players have noticed since Nuno took over.
Where many of the squad felt undercooked and under coached during Mourinho’s sessions, they have been worked extremely hard under Nuno. Double sessions have been a regular feature of pre-season and Nuno is very hands-on at Hotspur Way. He likes to stand by the goals to get the best view and will frequently interrupt if there is something that is not quite to his liking. Everything has to be done to the highest standards.
It’s on the training pitch that he comes alive and does the vast majority of his talking with his players. His sessions are said to be varied and enjoyable for the players, even if he is very preoccupied with team shape.
But players are certainly not complaining that they don’t feel fully pushed now. “Under Nuno, you train really hard,” Fuego says. “He is very intense and takes an active part in the sessions, demanding the player’s full attention throughout.”
Other former Nuno players use words like “relentless” and emphasise how well-drilled they were. His Wolves captain Conor Coady explained last year that Nuno also has some pet hates that players must learn to avoid. “When we’re on the training pitch, he’s speaking in the middle, it gets to him a bit when your hands are on your hips, because you’re not ready,” Coady said.
“He’ll say, ‘You’re not ready, get your hands off your hips’. You could be in formation, he could be in the middle of the pitch talking to you… I’ve been done for it when he first came in: you’re stood with your hands on your hips listening and it’s, ‘Take your hands off your hips, you’re not ready’. When he first came in it shocked us a little bit, but we understand what he’s saying.
“You’re thinking about everything. You’re always thinking about what he’s saying.”
Sports science
Closely linked to the way the two head coaches like to train is how they use sports science, and this is surely the biggest divergence between Nuno and Mourinho.Where the latter still prefers the eye test and to rely on his instincts, Nuno is one of the most cutting-edge managers in the Premier League. His trust in experts in the field explains the extraordinary injury record Wolves enjoyed in their first two seasons in the Premier League. They suffered just five in 2018-19 (setting a Premier League record for squad availability of 98.5 per cent) and then the following season, despite competing in 59 games across 383 days, used only 21 players in the Premier League — fewer than any team.
Hayward, Wolves’ head of medical for the majority of those two seasons, says Nuno put his complete trust in fitness coach Antonio Dias (who has joined him at Tottenham) and he played a major role in “revolutionising everything we did at Wolves”.
They moved away from traditional British customs. Hayward recalls that before Nuno arrived, Wolves had employed a traditional strength and conditioning approach where players would lift heavy weights in the gym. Nuno and Dias instantly changed that.
“The first time I met Nuno and gave him a tour of the training ground, he said, ‘We’re not weightlifters, we’re a football club. We don’t need these heavy weights’,” Hayward says. “Straight away they brought in a lot of new equipment that used a different type of methodology from a strength and conditioning perspective.
“We started to use things like flywheels and pulleys to generate resistance rather than weights. It meant players could work in the gym in a very functional way, doing lots of movements they would do in training or matches but with some resistance overload through these machines as opposed to doing more linear activities like squatting, which isn’t quite so functional.
“The players bought into that. As a result, they did the sessions really well, and we saw the benefits from a physical output perspective but also an injury prevention perspective. We had very few hamstring injuries at all — three in three years. Our availability rate was always very high because we got the guys working in such a way that they were very robust and resilient, and then the way the guys operated on the pitch was very scientific in terms of load management.”
Wolves became fitter and fitter, routinely winning matches in the second half of games. In the space of three weeks in December 2019 and January 2020, they twice came back from 2-0 down to win 3-2 — against Manchester City and then Southampton. Tottenham by contrast threw away the joint second-most points from winning positions last season (23) of any team in the Premier League.
By bringing Dias with him to Spurs, Nuno will employ a similarly scientific approach and as he said on Sunday, he hopes to see similar results.
“Antonio worked the players very hard,” Hayward says, “But the players became used to working that way and became very robust, and he was very good at looking at their physical output with the GPS metrics and working with Nuno to plan sessions to make sure the players were being worked very hard but were not being overworked, and also never being underloaded.
“If you have a period when players aren’t working so hard and then suddenly you increase the workload you can have injuries. What we did was have the training load consistently very high, and that allowed us to keep them fit.”
These sorts of mistakes have allegedly been made by Mourinho over the last few years. He is famously suspicious of GPS tracking technology and is said to have been reactive when it came to managing his players’ physical load. “He would just say the players need to work harder if things were not going well. Likewise, if things were going great then they might train a bit lighter,” a source says. “I got the impression Mourinho wasn’t the most sports science-driven coach out there.”
At United, Mourinho preferred to trust anecdotal evidence, particularly on injuries. My colleague Laurie Whitwell explained in depth in April how Mourinho gutted much of United’s sports science department. He also marginalised key members of the club’s sports science staff like Tony Strudwick, and the numbers paint a bleak picture of how this affected his team.
The below shows how Mourinho’s United stopped being able to win the ball high up the pitch.
At Spurs, Mourinho’s team came nowhere near to recreating the ferocity of the press of the peak Pochettino team.
“Nothing shows how much the picture has changed with Mourinho like how little his teams run compared with before,” says Simon Brundish, a sports science consultant for the Football Association.
“In 2002 the average Premier League team would run about 85 kilometres a game. Mourinho arrived with tactical periodisation in 2004 and his team ran about 98 kilometres — they blew everyone else out the water.
“Come 2015 the rest of the league was now running far more than that a game because of advances in sports sciences and changes of demographics. But Mourinho was still training teams to run at around 98 kilometres. Hence the change in result. Suddenly his teams aren’t fit compared to other teams. He’s replaced at United by Ole Gunnar Solskjaer who comes in and says we’re going to press, and the team just breaks.
“At Spurs, it was the same — they were physical monsters under Pochettino, battling with Liverpool to cover the most high-speed distance per game. That plummeted under Mourinho. They were nothing compared to where they were before.
“Nuno is the opposite — he likes tactical periodisation but loves sports science, and Wolves had a phenomenal injury record. Especially in that first Premier League season, there were barely any soft tissue injuries.”
Mourinho’s approach to injuries is different — he likes for his players to play through the pain. Like Son Heung-min when he was recovering from a fractured forearm in February 2020 (when he, jokingly perhaps, wondered if he still might be available) or the time Ben Davies suffered a calf injury when not fully fit against Aston Villa in March after defeats by Woolwich and Dinamo Zagreb. “When a player plays injured to help his team recover from two bad defeats, this can happen,” Mourinho wrote about Davies on Instagram. “A man, a team player.”
“He didn’t like players who were injured,” a source at United told The Athletic in April. “You can see it in the way he behaves on the touchline. He wants players to get up and carry on.”
Nuno’s approach to injury prevention is different. He doesn’t like players missing training with minor issues but that’s because he feels that the sessions are so critical to what he is trying to achieve — if they do miss sessions in the week they are unlikely to play at the weekend (let’s see if that applies to Kane this Sunday). And as much as possible, even rehab work should not be done separately from the training sessions.
Linked to this, Hayward remembers a lightbulb moment when Nuno explained why even partially injured players would be better off joining training sessions. “Nuno would be happy to accommodate players with slight fitness issues to get them back into training quicker,” Hayward recalls. “I remember having a good conversation with him when one of our players had a hamstring problem and I said, ‘He’s not ready, he’s not sprinting yet’.
“Nuno explained that the player in question hardly sprinted during training anyway and barely sprints maximally during a game so why do we want him to sprint maximally with you two weeks before he’s going to play in a game anyway? He said that it was much better to get him back in with the group doing the last stages of his rehab there rather than doing it separately to the team with a rehab coach or one of the sports science staff.
“He said he’d look after him in the session, and plan it around him a bit to make sure we can protect him. That was quite a novel approach but was a good point and he’s right. We knew from his stats that this player only sprints six or seven times a game.”
Nuno and his team were always across the details of every player at Wolves, with a thought-out methodology about how they structured each individual’s programme.
Away from injury prevention, nothing was left to chance. Nuno hired a nutritionist and chef as soon as he arrived at Wolves. Other reforms were introduced, like players wearing special glasses before evening games to acclimatise. Julio Figueroa, a psychologist from the University of Barcelona, was brought in as a mind coach. He worked one on one psychologically with the players — it’s understood he helped Traore a lot — and instigated sleep sessions during the middle of the day. Figueroa would get the players in a circle and send them to sleep like a hypnotist. He explained that a nap of roughly 20 minutes would do wonders for an athlete’s rehabilitation and recovery between matches.
The importance of sleep was also why Nuno wanted his Wolves players to live close to the club’s Compton Park training ground. So that they had time to go home and have a quick nap in between double sessions.
The players embraced the fitness and nutritional ideas because they could see the benefits on the pitch. At Spurs, Nuno knows he will be similarly judged on his results but there is goodwill from the players after often feeling unprepared under Mourinho.
Jorge Mendes
The last and perhaps most controversial topic is that of the superagent Jorge Mendes — the man who represents Nuno and Mourinho.It should be said first of all that Nuno and Mendes are far closer than Mourinho and Mendes. In fact, they are so close that their careers have been almost inextricably linked. At all of Nuno’s managerial jobs before Spurs, his clubs signed Mendes players — many of whom, especially at Wolves, would not have joined were it not for the agent’s connections.
Nuno met the agent at a nightclub Mendes owned in 1997, and the goalkeeper’s £720,000 move to Deportivo La Coruna was his first major deal. The pair have remained close friends ever since.
Back in Portugal, Nuno’s closeness to Mendes affects how his achievements are viewed. “Nuno did a really good job at Rio Ave in his first managerial job (finishing seventh in his first season and reaching both cup finals in his second),” Kundert says. “But Nuno has always been viewed slightly differently as a manager because of his connections with Mendes. It’s like he has to doubly prove himself because of the perception that he has had some very good players thanks to Mendes.”
Nuno has always been public in his praise for Mendes. Upon reaching one of those cup finals at Rio Ave he answered the phone to his agent ahead of the press conference starting and said “this is for you, this is for you”. When he left Valencia after a tumultuous period off the pitch, Nuno said in his farewell address: “He (Mendes) remains the best agent in the world. He has helped Valencia a lot.
“The players he has brought, I believe they will soon be the best in the world. You must recognise his work.”
Mourinho and Mendes’s relationship has never been anything like as public, and during the former’s most successful period, he did not sign a huge number of Mendes clients. This changed to an extent at Tottenham, with Doherty bought for £15 million, and Gedson Fernandes and Carlos Vinicius both arriving on loan. None of that trio could be described as a big success, and it meant that fans were sceptical towards the club hiring another Mendes client as head coach. Especially as another from the Gestifute stable, Gennaro Gattuso, also came close to getting the job and Mendes has a good relationship with recently appointed managing director of football Fabio Paratici.
But where Nuno’s previous three clubs were part of what some in Portugal describe as the “Mendes carousel” of teams that frequently trade his players, Spurs do not fit into that category. They have not signed a Mendes player this summer and sources close to the club dismiss the idea that anyone could influence chairman Daniel Levy in that way. As for Paratici, the Italian gets on well with pretty much every major player in the footballing world.
For Nuno though, Mendes has been a significant part of his career. English football supporters know about Mendes’ influence at Wolves, but it was at Valencia where the relationship played out most publicly.
Mendes had close connections with Peter Lim, who took over as owner of Valencia in 2014. Before him actually becoming the majority shareholder in the October, he had a say in Nuno becoming head coach that summer.
Given he had only previously managed at Rio Ave, a middling Portuguese team, Nuno appeared far too inexperienced for such a big job. But for the first season at least, the appointment seemed a very shrewd one. Though it’s worth remembering that vast sums were spent on players during Nuno’s 16 months in charge, including a dollop of Mendes clients like Gomes, Rodrigo, Joao Cancelo (now at Manchester City), and Enzo Perez — all of whom joined the club from Benfica during this period.
But despite that impressive first season, off the pitch a civil war was erupting over how the club was being run (the full story was outlined in November by The Athletic’s Dermot Corrigan). The row eventually led to Valencia legends Francisco Rufete (sporting director) and Roberto Ayala (club secretary) leaving the club in the summer of 2015, leading supporters to quickly turn on Lim, Mendes and, by association, Nuno.
When results were slow the following season, amid criticism of the performances of some of Mendes’ clients, the fans took their frustrations out on Nuno. The hostility was such that he resigned in November 2015 after a 1-0 home defeat by Sevilla. It was then, just before he was replaced by Gary Neville that he publicly praised Mendes.
After a period at Porto, another club with close links to Mendes, Nuno joined another one in Wolves. Staff at the Midlands club bristle at the suggestion that Mendes has undue influence at Molineux, but there is no denying the high number of his clients that have joined the club since the Chinese conglomerate Fosun that he has a close relationship with took over the club in 2016. In his season in the Championship, for instance, Nuno could call upon the sublime talents of Mendes clients like Ruben Neves and Jota.
It became customary for Wolves to sign Mendes clients over whichever targets others at the club put forward. Last January for instance, they brought in winger Daniel Podence over Dani Olmo, who ended up impressing for Spain at this summer’s Euro 2020.
In general, Nuno benefitted from the preponderance of Mendes clients he got to work with while at Wolves, but over his last year at the club that started to change a bit. Podence for instance has not been a big success, while the signing of right-back Nelson Semedo from Barcelona in a deal worth potentially up to almost £37 million does not so far look like money well spent.
While at Wolves, Nuno was happy to defer issues of recruitment to those who were paid to make those decisions. He is very much a head coach and is focused on training and improving the players, so is not expected to be bothered by the fact that Spurs’ recruitment will operate differently from at Molineux. Mourinho generally wanted more of a say in which players his clubs signed, and had several contacts in foreign markets whose judgment he trusted.
So after all this, the main question remains: can Nuno prove himself to be different from Mourinho in one key area, making a success of the Spurs head coach role?
As we head towards his first competitive match on Sunday, there appears to largely be goodwill towards the new man. He has been a dignified presence so far and his calmness when interviewed has been welcomed after the psychodrama of Mourinho’s time in charge.
His former colleagues are certainly backing him to “prove a few people wrong” and perhaps the swirling angst around Kane will help him create that siege mentality he likes.
“Will he succeed at Spurs? I hope so!” says his midfield general from Valencia, Fuego. “I think it’s his time and he’s ready.”
Ready to end the Mourinho comparisons once and for all.
Long piece but a must-read for Spurs fans. One of the most detailed profile manager pieces I've read.
Is Nuno really Jose Mourinho 2.0, or will his approach to managing Tottenham be totally different?
The same nationality, the same agent and, as of June when Nuno Espirito Santo took over at Tottenham Hotspur, Spurs head coaches past and present.
Ever since Nuno arrived in England with Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2017, he has had to field questions about Jose Mourinho.
With so much in common, and the fact Nuno was coached by Mourinho for two years at Porto, it’s been an easy comparison to make. And without doubt, Nuno is influenced by the man who led that Porto team to an unexpected Champions League win in 2004. Tight squads, developing a siege mentality, the tactical periodisation teachings of their compatriot Vitor Frade — these are all parts of the Nuno playbook.
“Jose Mourinho has an impact on me,” Nuno said in 2018. “I was a member of the squad in 2002-2003 and 2003-2004 at Porto. That will stay forever.”
But as much as they have qualities in common, the two men also have several profound differences. Nuno is in lots of ways, from his more reserved personality to his greater interest in sports science, Mourinho’s opposite.
“It’s a big misconception they’re similar,” says one source who knows both men well. “Off the pitch, they couldn’t be more different.”
Others point to their contrasting approach to the media as illustrative of how the two men diverge. Nuno the introvert, who at Wolves seemed to treat press conferences almost with disdain; Mourinho the extrovert, master of the soundbite.
Some of these perceptions may be overly simplistic, but as his predecessor at Tottenham and someone whose reign was ultimately a disappointment, it’s instructive to look at how Nuno compares with Mourinho.
Ahead of Nuno’s first competitive match as Spurs head coach at home to Manchester City on Sunday, a fixture Mourinho won 2-0 both times while he was in charge, The Athletic spoke to former colleagues and players to produce a proper evaluation of Tottenham’s new man.
Personality and man-management
At his unveiling press conference at Spurs, Nuno said that he had not spoken to Mourinho since taking the job — aware perhaps that most supporters wanted a clean break from the immediate past.
In his previous job at Wolves, Nuno clearly had a fondness for Mourinho, but he grew tired of the constant questioning about his compatriot ahead of every time their teams met. He has cited the influence of Mourinho insisting that the Porto team always ate together and building “bonds of commitment”. And he has praised how Mourinho managed to keep the whole squad happy — including someone like Nuno, who as the second-choice goalkeeper rarely played. Mourinho even let Nuno take a penalty, which he scored, in a 7-0 Portuguese cup win against Varzim SC in 2003.
At Wolves, Nuno endeavoured and managed to do likewise with his squad — despite, or perhaps because of, rarely rotating what was a small, tight-knit group.
The ability to create a siege mentality and a perception of “us against the world” is also something Nuno learned from Mourinho. The Wolves players generally loved playing for Nuno, and fully bought into what the team was trying to achieve.
Nuno is a complex person. He speaks five languages (English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Russian) and like Mourinho is extremely intelligent. He has an aura around him that makes colleagues simultaneously respectful and fearful. “A strong and silent type,” as one source puts it. “A strict father figure,” says another.
But he can also be extremely charming. Because of a disappointing final season at Wolves where they finished 13th (with the significant caveats of an injury crisis, Diogo Jota’s departure and an exhausted squad following a 59-game, 383-day season that didn’t finish until August 11), it’s easy to forget how popular he was. Promotion to the Premier League, consecutive seventh-placed finishes, Europa League quarter-finals, FA Cup semis. And all the while connecting with the supporters by celebrating with them after victories, commiserating after defeats, and making them feel like they were all part of something bigger. He achieved something similar in his first season at Valencia too.
“He did that brilliantly, getting the fans on side,” says Phil Hayward, who worked with Nuno for two and a half years as Wolves’ head of medical before leaving for MLS side LA Galaxy. “Wolves were gutted he left. He’ll get that bond back between fans and players again at Tottenham. The fans will really take to him.”
Already the signs look positive, with Nuno seeming to connect with the crowd during Sunday’s 1-0 win over Woolwich. The fans cheered his name loudly when it was read out just before kick-off and after the game he posed for photos with fans and signed autographs — just as he did after Spurs’ other pre-season friendlies.
As a former Chelsea manager and the man who replaced the beloved Mauricio Pochettino, winning the supporters over was something that Mourinho always struggled with. Nuno by contrast has no such baggage and should have goodwill from the supporters given the challenges that have already been thrown at him, most notably the saga around Harry Kane’s future.
At Wolves, Nuno made a conscious effort to be more interactive with the fans, knowing that a failure to develop a rapport had contributed to the unpopularity of his predecessor Paul Lambert.
At Porto, Nuno had been more reserved on the touchlines, which is more in keeping with how he generally likes to operate. Unlike Mourinho, he is not someone who will often laugh and joke at the training ground. “He’s very quiet and could be seen as introverted,” says one source. “He only speaks when it’s necessary, which makes it more powerful.”
Mourinho was different. He loved to have a laugh and gossip with colleagues, and at away matches would make a point of speaking to opposition staff.
Nuno is not one for small talk and has a tight inner circle, and if you are outside of that it feels impenetrable.
Interestingly, this is something he shares with Mourinho. “With Jose, you have to be all or nothing, commit to him 100 per cent,” a former Manchester United staff member told The Athletic in April. “If you get his trust, you’re OK, but if not, then you’re outside that circle. He would make that judgment call very quickly, whether you’re with him or not.”
Returning to the Nuno inner circle, three of his most trusted advisors have joined him at Tottenham — assistant head coach Ian Cathro (formerly of Newcastle United and Hearts), goalkeeper coach Rui Barbosa and fitness coach Antonio Dias. There is a group of six whom Nuno has worked with in different combinations for all five of his management jobs.
He is someone you have to work hard for his respect and attention, but when you earn it it’s extremely rewarding.
“He was demanding but also very close to the players,” remembers Javi Fuego, a defensive midfielder under Nuno at Valencia. “It was obvious that he had been a player and understood different aspects of a player’s day-to-day life and how to get the best of us. With me, he showed a closeness and affection to help in difficult times.”
Other former colleagues think his sometimes dour-seeming personality is more to do with how obsessed he is with the job at hand. “He thinks about football the whole time,” says Hayward. “When people thought he was a bit dour and not very personable, he was deep in thought about the next game or training session. He is a very deep thinker.”
When the mood takes him, Nuno can also be lighthearted — but always on his own terms. “He could be quite funny, with an infectious smile and laugh,” says Hayward. “You knew he was in a good mood because you’d see his beaming smile across the room. Occasionally he would crack a joke with the players but most of the time he’d be so deep in his thoughts.”
At Valencia — where initially at least, Nuno was more affable (his bruising experience there and then as Porto manager are said to have made him more serious) — he could also have an occasional laugh with his players. “When the training was over or during the warm down he was friendly and fun,” says Fuego.
Generally, though, the Nuno of today is someone colleagues tread very carefully around. Knocking on his door to ask for an explanation of one of his decisions is said to be one of the worst things you can do. Nuno feels that if a player has not been selected they should understand his logic without it being explicitly laid out.
So far at Tottenham, the players have largely found him distant and uncommunicative outside of training sessions and matches. He is not a big fan of one-on-one meetings or even team meetings, preferring to put all of his energies into training sessions. At Wolves, even his closest colleagues knew that they would have to pick their moments to approach him.
With his players at Molineux, Nuno was known for quickly switching from, as my colleague Tim Spiers put it, “arm-around-the-shoulder jokiness to Malcolm Tucker-level bollocking mode”. When stressed he could dish out a tirade at someone at the training ground for what seemed like an innocuous offence.
Players never really knew where they stood with him (likewise at Spurs some of his players are unsure if he rates them), which is a trait also associated with Sir Alex Ferguson and, of course, Mourinho.
“Jose could have a laugh,” according to a former Manchester United staff member. “When the going was good he would come into a room bubbly and gregarious. Then, other times, he’d lose games and be the total opposite.”
As for Nuno, “You’re friends with him at times but he knows how to grill you,” Matt Doherty, now at Spurs, said in 2019. “We’ve all been on the end of one of them but the next day, he’ll give you a hug and he’ll talk to you. He’s got the blend perfect.”
By contrast, The Athletic reported in April that Doherty’s confidence had been shattered by Mourinho. The tone was set after Doherty’s debut against Everton last September, when Mourinho said: “I could also feel some of my players are not fit. Matt (Doherty) was struggling to play the way he plays, as an example.”
Some of Mourinho’s colleagues at Spurs felt that his dictatorial approach was out of step with modern management. Nuno and his staff are viewed as having a better balance of carrot and stick. “Every one of them was very positive and helped the players by being very positive with them,” remembers Fuego. “At Valencia, he managed to get all of us to give 100 per cent. Under Nuno, I gave perhaps the best level of my entire career.”
“Creating a siege mentality is so important to Nuno,” says Hayward. “He always talked about the strength of the pack, the strength of the wolf within the pack. Making sure it felt like it was us against the world, he really got the lads to buy into that. We were like a family unit.”
To help build that unit, Nuno insisted from as soon as he arrived at Wolves in 2017 that his team always ate lunch together and stayed at a hotel the night before every game, be it home or away. The importance of communal team meals was something that had stuck with him from Mourinho’s Porto.
Since taking over at Tottenham, Nuno has been encouraging during matches — even when players like Dele Alli have tried things and given the ball away, something he typically finds frustrating. Dele was a player Mourinho famously chastised for doing so in a Carabao Cup game against Stoke City. Mourinho could also be very affectionate towards his Spurs players, as Nuno was last week following the draw at Chelsea. Steven Bergwijn, for instance, was on the receiving end of a big hug (Nuno loves a hug) at the end of the game after scoring the equaliser.
Control is fundamental to Nuno. In pre-COVID times he would make a point of shaking the hands of everyone in the room, including the cameramen, before starting a press conference. It was his way of marking his territory.
Occasionally, such as during the first lockdown in March 2020, Nuno would even drop into the squad’s WhatsApp group to send encouraging messages. And in contrast to Mourinho, Nuno would never call a player out publicly. “If something wasn’t right, he’d let it be known in a one-on-one meeting or most likely a walk across the training pitch,” says Hayward.
One doubt that remains over Nuno is how he will do at Spurs dealing with some of the club’s bigger personalities. At Wolves, Nuno generally liked players who were young and wouldn’t stand up to him. “I do wonder how he’ll do with the bigger personalities,” says one source. “He never really had that at Wolves.
“Generally there he had young Portuguese players who would pretty much do what he asked of them with very little pushback, and he was pretty demanding.”
Dealing with big names is of course something his predecessor Mourinho had far more experience in. As is, and it’s important not to lose sight of this, winning trophies. For all Mourinho has been criticised in the last few years, that is something that for more than a decade he was a master at. Nuno by contrast has never led a team to a top-flight trophy and has only managed in the Champions League in two seasons (both of which ended in group-stage exits).
Silverware and a top-four finish are Tottenham’s targets this season. Though some feel that the two men’s contrasting pedigrees may actually help Nuno, since he arrives in north London with a point to prove, whereas Mourinho sometimes gave the impression that the job was beneath him. “Same coach, different players,” could be his Tottenham epitaph.
Away from the dressing room, Nuno loves playing golf and spending time with his family. He advocates living in “small circles” and suffered badly when he couldn’t see his family last year during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is said to have been revitalised by going back to Portugal to be with them this summer and this should be to Spurs’ benefit this season.
Tactical approach
Tactics are one of the areas where Nuno and Mourinho are most frequently compared. Both are seen as reactive coaches who like to play on the counter-attack.
And both come from a country where tactics are paid a huge amount of attention. “It still amazes me that you watch any football analysis programme in Portugal and they spend at least half of the time talking about attacks rather than individual players,” says Tom Kundert, the Portugal correspondent for World Soccer magazine. “Tactics are almost everything here, so it’s more the Portuguese influence on Nuno than just Mourinho.
“Both come from the Portuguese school of adapting your team to the opposition, which some feel Mourinho has become too focused on in the last few years.”
Like Mourinho, a lot of Nuno’s focus is on how his team are set up without the ball. “Traditionally you are defending, you recover the ball, you counter-attack,” he said in March 2020. “But you can prepare where you recover the ball, who is going to recover the ball. You are determining the moment of your counter-attack. You can unbalance a team without the ball. I work a lot on that process.”
Nuno’s preference to sit in and see what their opponents had to offer meant that a recurring theme at Wolves was starting games slowly. In their 114 Premier League games under him, they scored almost twice as many goals in the second halves of matches as they did in first halves (87 to 47). The strong finishes were also down to how fit the team were — something Nuno said on Sunday he wants his Spurs team to emulate.
As Porto manager between 2016 and 2017, Nuno developed a similar reputation for playing conservatively. At Valencia, however, Nuno was celebrated for how entertaining his team was. And even at Wolves, the team played some extremely exciting football to win promotion and then beat the likes of Manchester City, Chelsea and Spurs as they twice finished seventh in the Premier League.
Those who know Nuno well say he is a pragmatist rather than an idealist like Mourinho, who will very rarely deviate from four at the back and playing on the counter. Nuno is not wedded to a particular style or system, but will select whatever suits the players best. The three at the back at Wolves was actually at odds with the back four he has used for almost all of his career — including so far at Tottenham.
“He’s way too intelligent to always play the same system,” says one source. “He’s shown how attacking he was at Valencia and then how he changed things around at Wolves. So even if he’s never shown he can manage a team with 70 per possession, he’s shown he can play with different systems. There’s no reason he can’t adapt to what suits Tottenham because he’s a very good coach.”
Whatever system he plays, Nuno is obsessed with shape, and letting each player know exactly what their roles will be for the game. What the Wolves players appreciated was how simple he made things seem, giving them two or three main tasks to focus on. And then if it was going wrong, Nuno would issue a short, clear message to try to correct it.
“From a tactical perspective he had a very specific way he wanted to play and was very clear that he wanted the lads to understand the approach from the outset,” Hayward remembers. “So the first pre-season training session would be very detailed with lots of tactically-orientated drills. There would be no flexibility within that, and if things weren’t right he’d stop them until they were.”
When looking at the type of system and approach Nuno has typically employed, the numbers paint an interesting picture.
At Wolves, it’s no surprise to see that Nuno used a back three for the most part, and a back four only 14 times.
At Porto and Valencia, however, Nuno almost always played with four at the back (exclusively so at Porto).
Revealingly, one of those occasions Nuno used a back three at Valencia was against the Champions League holders Real Madrid in a 2-1 home win, which Nuno cherishes as one of his finest tactical triumphs. A night when his defence, including Shkodran Mustafi and Nicolas Otamendi, got the better of Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale and Karim Benzema.
As a counterpoint, Mourinho has been more wedded to his preferred 4-2-3-1/4-3-3 over the last few years — illustrating that he is more about employing a specific system and asking the players to fit around it rather than the other way around. Mourinho was certainly attached to his 4-2-3-1 while at Tottenham.
It was a similar story at Manchester United.
As for how Nuno likes to approach games, something that stands out, especially last season, is how much he likes to keep control. It might have been that he knew the limitations of the attack so they stayed more compact as a unit, but looking at the number of possessions last season (ie, how many times the ball changed hands between the teams during the game), Wolves had the third-lowest average in the league (87.9 possessions per 90 minutes) behind Woolwich and Manchester City. Essentially, the games were not too frenetic compared with other teams in the league — Wolves perhaps allowing the opposition to have the ball where they felt there was not much danger. For context, Spurs were the eighth highest here with 92.8 possessions per 90. In general, Nuno is wary of wildcard players who take risks and end up giving the ball away — as explained in relation to Tanguy Ndombele earlier in the week.
As well as turnovers in possession, we can look at direct attacks as something of a proxy of a counter-attack. Direct attacks are “possessions that start in a team’s defensive half and result in a shot or touch inside the opposition penalty area within 15 seconds”. Spurs’ 2.7 direct attacks per 90 minutes was the sixth highest in the league last season, ahead of Wolves with 2.2 per 90 (11th highest).
These numbers suggest that Wolves last season were a little bit safer in and out of possession under Nuno, but that may have been down to issues like the Jota sale and the Raul Jimenez injury. In 2019-20, Wolves had their fourth-highest number of direct attacks — spearheaded by the thrilling trio of Jota, Jimenez and Adama Traore (Spurs fans will remember them combining extremely effectively on the counter in Wolves’ 3-2 win at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in March 2020).
Compare that with last season (below), and it’s clear how much less potent Wolves were without their previously two most important forwards.
For Spurs (see below), one alarming number from under Mourinho last season that jumps out is how slowly they attacked overall when they had the ball — the 14th quickest in the Premier League when advancing the ball in metres per second.
When trying to explain why Nuno is not an inherently defensive coach, it is instructive to look back at his time at Valencia. It was here that the side finished fourth in his first season with 77 points (the same number that Rafa Benitez achieved in winning La Liga with them in 2004) and for the first half of the season were arguably even better to watch than Barcelona and Real Madrid. The key, though, was how they married defensive shape with lightning-quick counter-attacks.
“We defended very well as a block,” Fuego explains. “It was difficult to score against us and we also had very fast and effective transitions. We were a very intense team.”
Valencia were comfortable playing out from the back and happy to have more possession than their opponents. Those watching say they remember it being very un-Mourinho like at the time.
A Guardian report in October 2014 after Valencia beat La Liga champions Atletico Madrid 3-1 to go briefly top of the table was fulsome in its praise of Nuno.
“Nuno is charismatic, open and energetic, and the results have been spectacular,” the article reads. “Players speak of a new, collective spirit, and there is a clarity about the way they play too — direct, aggressive, quick and intense. More Jurgen Klopp than Pep Guardiola or Jose Mourinho. Nuno wants his team to go straight for the throat.”
“The midfielders always pressure,” Nuno said after the game. “I want the team to always attack.”
At this point, seven games into the 2014-15 season, Nuno could do no wrong. Although his side couldn’t maintain a title bid, qualifying for the Champions League was a big achievement — even if the Portuguese was given a leg-up by the club investing heavily in transfers the previous summer. Having his close friend and agent Mendes so closely involved helped in this regard (more on that later). But with a fluid attack that included Paco Alcacer and Rodrigo (now at Leeds United) rotating between the false nine position and wide areas, Pablo Piatti on the left wing and a central midfield of Fuego, Dani Parejo and Andre Gomes (now at Everton), it was an exciting side. Alvaro Negredo could also add another dimension up front when Nuno wanted to be more attacking and play with two strikers.
It was a team that could hurt you in many ways and one that Nuno was constantly making small tweaks to, changing the system at half-time if needed. Of this flexibility and ability to change things midway through a game, one of his former players told The Athletic last year that: “(At half-time) he makes subtle changes. He may change the personnel, but more likely he’ll just hold a midfielder 10 yards deeper, or tell you to focus on a certain side of the pitch. They’re basic messages that make perfect sense when he says them.
“There are so many times after a game when you think what he said at half-time was absolutely correct and won us the match.”
It’s all about adaptability, and given this is something Nuno has shown himself capable of again and again, one can understand why his former colleagues bristled a bit at the suggestion he would simply rock up to Spurs and blindly employ a 3-4-3.
Training
In a broad sense, Nuno and Mourinho share the same key principles about how to train. They are both disciples of their compatriot Vitor Frade, a professor of physical education and philosophy at the University of Porto. It was Frade who pioneered the coaching approach known as “tactical periodisation”, which originated in Porto. The idea was to completely reject the notion that the physical, technical, tactical and mental elements of football should be trained individually.
Mourinho met Frade when working with the Vitoria de Setubal academy in the early 1990s and they remained in contact for the next 10 years or so. Mourinho was viewed as a revolutionary when he came to England in 2004, merging all the different forms of training and insisting that everything was done with the ball. Mourinho’s sessions were about preparing his players for the rigours of a match and so his sessions always lasted 90 minutes — or 120 minutes if he was preparing his squad for a match that might involve extra time.
Nuno shares Mourinho’s belief in tactical periodisation and everything about the way his team train is geared towards replicating what the players will face on match days. “Nuno makes sure that having the right shape in training is there in everything they do,” says Hayward. “So even the warm-up might be in that particular shape to make sure players have a really good sense of where they should be.”
Nuno and Mourinho’s ideology may be broadly the same but the way they operate during training sessions is very different. And this has been one of the biggest differences the players have noticed since Nuno took over.
Where many of the squad felt undercooked and under coached during Mourinho’s sessions, they have been worked extremely hard under Nuno. Double sessions have been a regular feature of pre-season and Nuno is very hands-on at Hotspur Way. He likes to stand by the goals to get the best view and will frequently interrupt if there is something that is not quite to his liking. Everything has to be done to the highest standards.
It’s on the training pitch that he comes alive and does the vast majority of his talking with his players. His sessions are said to be varied and enjoyable for the players, even if he is very preoccupied with team shape.
But players are certainly not complaining that they don’t feel fully pushed now. “Under Nuno, you train really hard,” Fuego says. “He is very intense and takes an active part in the sessions, demanding the player’s full attention throughout.”
Other former Nuno players use words like “relentless” and emphasise how well-drilled they were. His Wolves captain Conor Coady explained last year that Nuno also has some pet hates that players must learn to avoid. “When we’re on the training pitch, he’s speaking in the middle, it gets to him a bit when your hands are on your hips, because you’re not ready,” Coady said.
“He’ll say, ‘You’re not ready, get your hands off your hips’. You could be in formation, he could be in the middle of the pitch talking to you… I’ve been done for it when he first came in: you’re stood with your hands on your hips listening and it’s, ‘Take your hands off your hips, you’re not ready’. When he first came in it shocked us a little bit, but we understand what he’s saying.
“You’re thinking about everything. You’re always thinking about what he’s saying.”
Sports science
Closely linked to the way the two head coaches like to train is how they use sports science, and this is surely the biggest divergence between Nuno and Mourinho.
Where the latter still prefers the eye test and to rely on his instincts, Nuno is one of the most cutting-edge managers in the Premier League. His trust in experts in the field explains the extraordinary injury record Wolves enjoyed in their first two seasons in the Premier League. They suffered just five in 2018-19 (setting a Premier League record for squad availability of 98.5 per cent) and then the following season, despite competing in 59 games across 383 days, used only 21 players in the Premier League — fewer than any team.
Hayward, Wolves’ head of medical for the majority of those two seasons, says Nuno put his complete trust in fitness coach Antonio Dias (who has joined him at Tottenham) and he played a major role in “revolutionising everything we did at Wolves”.
They moved away from traditional British customs. Hayward recalls that before Nuno arrived, Wolves had employed a traditional strength and conditioning approach where players would lift heavy weights in the gym. Nuno and Dias instantly changed that.
“The first time I met Nuno and gave him a tour of the training ground, he said, ‘We’re not weightlifters, we’re a football club. We don’t need these heavy weights’,” Hayward says. “Straight away they brought in a lot of new equipment that used a different type of methodology from a strength and conditioning perspective.
“We started to use things like flywheels and pulleys to generate resistance rather than weights. It meant players could work in the gym in a very functional way, doing lots of movements they would do in training or matches but with some resistance overload through these machines as opposed to doing more linear activities like squatting, which isn’t quite so functional.
“The players bought into that. As a result, they did the sessions really well, and we saw the benefits from a physical output perspective but also an injury prevention perspective. We had very few hamstring injuries at all — three in three years. Our availability rate was always very high because we got the guys working in such a way that they were very robust and resilient, and then the way the guys operated on the pitch was very scientific in terms of load management.”
Wolves became fitter and fitter, routinely winning matches in the second half of games. In the space of three weeks in December 2019 and January 2020, they twice came back from 2-0 down to win 3-2 — against Manchester City and then Southampton. Tottenham by contrast threw away the joint second-most points from winning positions last season (23) of any team in the Premier League.
By bringing Dias with him to Spurs, Nuno will employ a similarly scientific approach and as he said on Sunday, he hopes to see similar results.
“Antonio worked the players very hard,” Hayward says, “But the players became used to working that way and became very robust, and he was very good at looking at their physical output with the GPS metrics and working with Nuno to plan sessions to make sure the players were being worked very hard but were not being overworked, and also never being underloaded.
“If you have a period when players aren’t working so hard and then suddenly you increase the workload you can have injuries. What we did was have the training load consistently very high, and that allowed us to keep them fit.”
These sorts of mistakes have allegedly been made by Mourinho over the last few years. He is famously suspicious of GPS tracking technology and is said to have been reactive when it came to managing his players’ physical load. “He would just say the players need to work harder if things were not going well. Likewise, if things were going great then they might train a bit lighter,” a source says. “I got the impression Mourinho wasn’t the most sports science-driven coach out there.”
At United, Mourinho preferred to trust anecdotal evidence, particularly on injuries. My colleague Laurie Whitwell explained in depth in April how Mourinho gutted much of United’s sports science department. He also marginalised key members of the club’s sports science staff like Tony Strudwick, and the numbers paint a bleak picture of how this affected his team.
The below shows how Mourinho’s United stopped being able to win the ball high up the pitch.
At Spurs, Mourinho’s team came nowhere near to recreating the ferocity of the press of the peak Pochettino team.
“Nothing shows how much the picture has changed with Mourinho like how little his teams run compared with before,” says Simon Brundish, a sports science consultant for the Football Association.
“In 2002 the average Premier League team would run about 85 kilometres a game. Mourinho arrived with tactical periodisation in 2004 and his team ran about 98 kilometres — they blew everyone else out the water.
“Come 2015 the rest of the league was now running far more than that a game because of advances in sports sciences and changes of demographics. But Mourinho was still training teams to run at around 98 kilometres. Hence the change in result. Suddenly his teams aren’t fit compared to other teams. He’s replaced at United by Ole Gunnar Solskjaer who comes in and says we’re going to press, and the team just breaks.
“At Spurs, it was the same — they were physical monsters under Pochettino, battling with Liverpool to cover the most high-speed distance per game. That plummeted under Mourinho. They were nothing compared to where they were before.
“Nuno is the opposite — he likes tactical periodisation but loves sports science, and Wolves had a phenomenal injury record. Especially in that first Premier League season, there were barely any soft tissue injuries.”
Mourinho’s approach to injuries is different — he likes for his players to play through the pain. Like Son Heung-min when he was recovering from a fractured forearm in February 2020 (when he, jokingly perhaps, wondered if he still might be available) or the time Ben Davies suffered a calf injury when not fully fit against Aston Villa in March after defeats by Woolwich and Dinamo Zagreb. “When a player plays injured to help his team recover from two bad defeats, this can happen,” Mourinho wrote about Davies on Instagram. “A man, a team player.”
“He didn’t like players who were injured,” a source at United told The Athletic in April. “You can see it in the way he behaves on the touchline. He wants players to get up and carry on.”
Nuno’s approach to injury prevention is different. He doesn’t like players missing training with minor issues but that’s because he feels that the sessions are so critical to what he is trying to achieve — if they do miss sessions in the week they are unlikely to play at the weekend (let’s see if that applies to Kane this Sunday). And as much as possible, even rehab work should not be done separately from the training sessions.
Linked to this, Hayward remembers a lightbulb moment when Nuno explained why even partially injured players would be better off joining training sessions. “Nuno would be happy to accommodate players with slight fitness issues to get them back into training quicker,” Hayward recalls. “I remember having a good conversation with him when one of our players had a hamstring problem and I said, ‘He’s not ready, he’s not sprinting yet’.
“Nuno explained that the player in question hardly sprinted during training anyway and barely sprints maximally during a game so why do we want him to sprint maximally with you two weeks before he’s going to play in a game anyway? He said that it was much better to get him back in with the group doing the last stages of his rehab there rather than doing it separately to the team with a rehab coach or one of the sports science staff.
“He said he’d look after him in the session, and plan it around him a bit to make sure we can protect him. That was quite a novel approach but was a good point and he’s right. We knew from his stats that this player only sprints six or seven times a game.”
Nuno and his team were always across the details of every player at Wolves, with a thought-out methodology about how they structured each individual’s programme.
Away from injury prevention, nothing was left to chance. Nuno hired a nutritionist and chef as soon as he arrived at Wolves. Other reforms were introduced, like players wearing special glasses before evening games to acclimatise. Julio Figueroa, a psychologist from the University of Barcelona, was brought in as a mind coach. He worked one on one psychologically with the players — it’s understood he helped Traore a lot — and instigated sleep sessions during the middle of the day. Figueroa would get the players in a circle and send them to sleep like a hypnotist. He explained that a nap of roughly 20 minutes would do wonders for an athlete’s rehabilitation and recovery between matches.
The importance of sleep was also why Nuno wanted his Wolves players to live close to the club’s Compton Park training ground. So that they had time to go home and have a quick nap in between double sessions.
The players embraced the fitness and nutritional ideas because they could see the benefits on the pitch. At Spurs, Nuno knows he will be similarly judged on his results but there is goodwill from the players after often feeling unprepared under Mourinho.
Jorge Mendes
The last and perhaps most controversial topic is that of the superagent Jorge Mendes — the man who represents Nuno and Mourinho.
It should be said first of all that Nuno and Mendes are far closer than Mourinho and Mendes. In fact, they are so close that their careers have been almost inextricably linked. At all of Nuno’s managerial jobs before Spurs, his clubs signed Mendes players — many of whom, especially at Wolves, would not have joined were it not for the agent’s connections.
Nuno met the agent at a nightclub Mendes owned in 1997, and the goalkeeper’s £720,000 move to Deportivo La Coruna was his first major deal. The pair have remained close friends ever since.
Back in Portugal, Nuno’s closeness to Mendes affects how his achievements are viewed. “Nuno did a really good job at Rio Ave in his first managerial job (finishing seventh in his first season and reaching both cup finals in his second),” Kundert says. “But Nuno has always been viewed slightly differently as a manager because of his connections with Mendes. It’s like he has to doubly prove himself because of the perception that he has had some very good players thanks to Mendes.”
Nuno has always been public in his praise for Mendes. Upon reaching one of those cup finals at Rio Ave he answered the phone to his agent ahead of the press conference starting and said “this is for you, this is for you”. When he left Valencia after a tumultuous period off the pitch, Nuno said in his farewell address: “He (Mendes) remains the best agent in the world. He has helped Valencia a lot.
“The players he has brought, I believe they will soon be the best in the world. You must recognise his work.”
Mourinho and Mendes’s relationship has never been anything like as public, and during the former’s most successful period, he did not sign a huge number of Mendes clients. This changed to an extent at Tottenham, with Doherty bought for £15 million, and Gedson Fernandes and Carlos Vinicius both arriving on loan. None of that trio could be described as a big success, and it meant that fans were sceptical towards the club hiring another Mendes client as head coach. Especially as another from the Gestifute stable, Gennaro Gattuso, also came close to getting the job and Mendes has a good relationship with recently appointed managing director of football Fabio Paratici.
But where Nuno’s previous three clubs were part of what some in Portugal describe as the “Mendes carousel” of teams that frequently trade his players, Spurs do not fit into that category. They have not signed a Mendes player this summer and sources close to the club dismiss the idea that anyone could influence chairman Daniel Levy in that way. As for Paratici, the Italian gets on well with pretty much every major player in the footballing world.
For Nuno though, Mendes has been a significant part of his career. English football supporters know about Mendes’ influence at Wolves, but it was at Valencia where the relationship played out most publicly.
Mendes had close connections with Peter Lim, who took over as owner of Valencia in 2014. Before him actually becoming the majority shareholder in the October, he had a say in Nuno becoming head coach that summer.
Given he had only previously managed at Rio Ave, a middling Portuguese team, Nuno appeared far too inexperienced for such a big job. But for the first season at least, the appointment seemed a very shrewd one. Though it’s worth remembering that vast sums were spent on players during Nuno’s 16 months in charge, including a dollop of Mendes clients like Gomes, Rodrigo, Joao Cancelo (now at Manchester City), and Enzo Perez — all of whom joined the club from Benfica during this period.
But despite that impressive first season, off the pitch a civil war was erupting over how the club was being run (the full story was outlined in November by The Athletic’s Dermot Corrigan). The row eventually led to Valencia legends Francisco Rufete (sporting director) and Roberto Ayala (club secretary) leaving the club in the summer of 2015, leading supporters to quickly turn on Lim, Mendes and, by association, Nuno.
When results were slow the following season, amid criticism of the performances of some of Mendes’ clients, the fans took their frustrations out on Nuno. The hostility was such that he resigned in November 2015 after a 1-0 home defeat by Sevilla. It was then, just before he was replaced by Gary Neville that he publicly praised Mendes.
After a period at Porto, another club with close links to Mendes, Nuno joined another one in Wolves. Staff at the Midlands club bristle at the suggestion that Mendes has undue influence at Molineux, but there is no denying the high number of his clients that have joined the club since the Chinese conglomerate Fosun that he has a close relationship with took over the club in 2016. In his season in the Championship, for instance, Nuno could call upon the sublime talents of Mendes clients like Ruben Neves and Jota.
It became customary for Wolves to sign Mendes clients over whichever targets others at the club put forward. Last January for instance, they brought in winger Daniel Podence over Dani Olmo, who ended up impressing for Spain at this summer’s Euro 2020.
In general, Nuno benefitted from the preponderance of Mendes clients he got to work with while at Wolves, but over his last year at the club that started to change a bit. Podence for instance has not been a big success, while the signing of right-back Nelson Semedo from Barcelona in a deal worth potentially up to almost £37 million does not so far look like money well spent.
While at Wolves, Nuno was happy to defer issues of recruitment to those who were paid to make those decisions. He is very much a head coach and is focused on training and improving the players, so is not expected to be bothered by the fact that Spurs’ recruitment will operate differently from at Molineux. Mourinho generally wanted more of a say in which players his clubs signed, and had several contacts in foreign markets whose judgment he trusted.
So after all this, the main question remains: can Nuno prove himself to be different from Mourinho in one key area, making a success of the Spurs head coach role?
As we head towards his first competitive match on Sunday, there appears to largely be goodwill towards the new man. He has been a dignified presence so far and his calmness when interviewed has been welcomed after the psychodrama of Mourinho’s time in charge.
His former colleagues are certainly backing him to “prove a few people wrong” and perhaps the swirling angst around Kane will help him create that siege mentality he likes.
“Will he succeed at Spurs? I hope so!” says his midfield general from Valencia, Fuego. “I think it’s his time and he’s ready.”
I'd be really interested to see W/L/D stats against those formation charts...... Any such thing likely, G?
This last line you or the article?
Was wondering what your thoughts on Nuno were given your aggressive stance on Jose.
Beard, bollocks; BOSH. :nunothumbs:
Brentford probably will too today
Lacking in time today to dig out those numbers mate.
My expectations are low'ish for Nuno, to put that into context though I do not foresee the disaster I saw and foretold under the dinosaur, so as consequence I'm expecting us to finish higher than 7th.
Basic thoughts though are we will be better-balanced team both with and without the ball, we will compete far better too due to our balance but also our fitness. I think we will look more organised and we will play a more fluid attack, with movement across the front and a midfield engaging too.
I think his biggest problem to find solutions to is still the midfield. Based on pre-season alone Lo Celso, Skipp, PEH, Dele look to be who he's initially going with as a 3, probably Winks and perhaps Ndombele if he can bring his fitness on to a level he thinks it should be (bear in mind that the Dinosaur had us the unfittest we've been for a couple of decades, I'm guessing that since Ndombele got mins from Mourinho the last term that the fitness level he was at he maybe thought would be acceptable for this season. Clearly not for Nuno).
Tactically I didn't like how our midfield 3 played in the first half vs Chavs, with the 8's of Skipp and Dele pushed out very wide, it meant we had no midfield (I get why coaches push 8's out wide, so one of the front 3 can drop in - But it simply didn't work). I'm not convinced PEH is a top draw 6 (he showed he was a good 8 at The Euro's for example). So much hinges on the fitness of Ndombele and Lo Celso to make a midfield 3 work, both of these two players hold the key to a midfield 3 working as both in their own way can bring the ball through midfield from deep (no one else can).