Is Andre Villas-Boas About to Take Over the World?

The side with the best record in all of Europe has not lost in 23 matches in all competitions,winning 20 of those. They are the only side in Europe yet to lose in any competition this season. They have kept clean sheets in over 2/3 of their league fixtures, are 8 points clear at the top of the table after just 13 fixtures, and have a goal differential more than twice as good as their nearest competitor. And they’ve done all this coming off a season in which they finished third, fired their manager, and sold off their two best players over the summer to boot.

How have they done it? By hiring a new manager – a 33 year-old coaching prodigy who gave up playing the game as a teenager to devote his life to tactics, scouting, and coaching. You may want to take a second to read this and get to know this guy, because you might be hearing an awful lot about him over the next couple of decades.

His name is Andre Villas-Boas, and the team is FC Porto, currently running roughshod over opposition in the Portuguese Liga and the Europa League. If you’re thinking “young coach at FC Porto making a name for himself by turning heads in Europe – sounds familiar…,” this is only the tip of the iceberg of the familiar footprints in which he walks. Villas-Boas joined Porto’s scouting department at the ripe old age of 18, when Sir Bobby Robson was still in charge of the club. At the age of 21, he became technical director of the British Virgin Islands FA, and coached their national team for 18 months. He returned to Porto to coach Porto’s U-19 squad, where he impressed then-Porto manager Jose Mourinho so much that Mourinho put Villas-Boas on his first-team coaching staff. When Mourinho moved on to Chelsea, Villas-Boas moved with him, and was tasked with making a compilation DVD of each player on the opposing team to highlight their strengths and weaknesses, a task that required viewing, analyzing, and editing thousands upon thousands of hours of game film per season. When Mourinho left for Internazionale, Villas-Boas followed suit.

In October 2009, Portuguese side Academica de Coimbra were dead in the water. They had taken just 3 points from their first 8 matches. They were languishing in last place, had only kept one clean sheet in the first 3 months of the season, and had only tallied 7 goals all season. Their manager resigned. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so instead of turning to experienced retreads, they threw a Hail Mary and gave 31 year-old Villas-Boas his first managerial job, the difficult task of saving them from relegation. He did not disappoint.

The turnaround was instantaneous. In their three matches in November 2009 alone the club took 7 points, scored 6 goals, and kept two clean sheets, only conceding once the entire month. The turnaround was under way. Academica suddenly became one of the tougher teams to beat in the league, and when the dust had settled on the season, they were in 11th place, comfortably mid-table, and had an inspired run to the domestic cup semi-final, where they lost to Porto at the Stadio Dragao 1-0 on a late winner. The next big thing In Portuguese football had arrived.

Porto were so impressed that they fired coach Jesualdo Ferreira to hire Villas-Boas. All Ferriera had done was win three consecutive league titles in 2007, 2008, and 2009, as well as getting Porto to the quarterfinals (where they narrowly lost to Manchester United) of the Champions League in 2008-2009, and getting them out of the group stages in four consecutive years from 2007-2010, a feat only matched by Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United, Barcelona, Real Madrid, AC Milan, Inter, and Lyon – elite company indeed. Firing a manager with such a track record of success coming off of one disappointing season seemed to be exactly what we as football fans have been conditioned to despise – a knee-jerk jettisoning of someone with a proven track record of success for the hot new flavor of the month.

Over the summer, two of Porto’s best players, Portuguese internationals Bruno Alves and Raul Meireles, were sold, making his job that much more difficult. Everything seemed to be set up for the hubris of Porto’s board and of Villas-Boas himself to be punished with some sort of karmic comeuppance. But just the opposite has happened. He has won. And won. And won. FC Porto are 8 points clear after 13 fixtures, and threatening to run away with the league. They have gone 4-1-0 in the Europa League, clinching their group with a game still to play. Their defensive record is an incredible 9 clean sheets in 13 league matches, conceding just 5 goals in total in the league. And they are by far and away the highest-scoring team in Portuguese football, averaging over 2 goals per game in a league not known for its scoring.

The big question surrounding Villas-Boas is: is he for real? If Porto continues to steamroll their opposition, and win the league and make a deep run into the Europa League, Villas-Boas will have the world at his fingertips. While big clubs may be put off by the seemingly risky move of hiring such a young coach, they would perhaps be best served by reconsidering. For while he is just 33, in terms of traditional coaching career arcs, he is much, much older. If you take away the simple numerical age, and describe his career and experience – 15 years learning from Robson and Mourinho, a top assistant on teams which have won the Champions League, the Premiership, the League Cup, the FA Cup, and Serie A, plus his unqualified success in his brief time as a manager in his own right – he would certainly be a guy a lot of elite clubs would be taking a long look at. It may simply come down to what he wants – he seems to be comfortable at Porto in his native country, and if he is happy and successful there, he may not be willing to leave until exactly the right job comes along. But if he keeps up the way he has been, that won’t be very long.

In terms of a bigger picture, Villas-Boas may be the new poster-child for the movement towards professionalization of the coaching profession. For as long as the game has been around, the general idea has been that great players should logically make great coaches, so when players retire, they go get their coaching badges and get back in the game in a different capacity. But what we’ve seen is that the best coaches were not necessarily the best players. Arsene Wenger had a very undistinguished playing career. Rafa Benitez was done playing by the age of 26. Mourinho was done playing by the age of 22. Certainly there are exceptions (Guardiola played for Barcelona for years, Alex Ferguson was a very good player in the Scottish Premier League, Ancelotti played for Roma and Milan for over a decade), but more and more it seems like we’re seeing successful coaches who were not great players, but threw themselves wholeheartedly into coaching at a relatively young age.

That this is happening isn’t surprising in the least. If there’s any surprise to it, it’s that it didn’t happen sooner. As an American, this has been going on in our professional sports for years. Now we have people who know from a relatively young age that they want to coach, or scout, or be in charge of personnel, and they pursue that from the beginning, not after their playing career is finished. And why wouldn’t this work better? Why wouldn’t it work like every other profession? Let me put it this way – if you were looking for a brain surgeon, would you want the guy who had been working to become a brain surgeon since he was 18, or the guy who turned to it in his late 30s after finishing up his previous career?

In an age of increasing tactical complexity and nuance, we are seeing more and more that many ex-players, even players who were great leaders of men on the pitch, are not up to the task (Tony Adams, Roy Keane, etc.). The game is changing, and while inspiring players has always and will always be an important part of the game, it’s simply not enough to give a rousing speech and a “give ‘em what for, lads!” in the locker room any more – at least not when the guy in the other locker room has individual scouting DVDs of every one of your players and has studied them for all your players strengths and weaknesses, coming up with a detailed tactical gameplan for beating your team.

And maybe that’s what Villas-Boas represents. There are a lot of us who either suffered an injury, simply lacked the physical ability, or, in my case, discovered marijuana and Pink Floyd, and gave up playing the game. And I think the assumption we all made was that we not only gave up on playing, but any hope of coaching, too. But what if that weren’t the case? What if the 16 year-old kid who has logged thousands of hours playing Football Manager, who obsessively watches tapes of games, and who gains a depth of understanding about the game from a young age COULD coach? Surely there are some clubs who would be willing to pay some bright young kids fresh out of school a pittance to analyze game tape and do the coaching grunt work. And if they do, won’t some of those kids eventually show some proficiency for the game and coaching, and work their way up the ranks?

Time will tell. And yes, I understand that there is an element of hyperbole to this column. As of yet, Villas-Boas is just a 33 year-old with less than a year of managerial experience who hasn’t won anything on his own. But his resume is already impressive, and he carries himself with an air of confidence that at the very least suggests that he knows deep down that he can do this and he belongs in the position he is in. And if he does turn out to be the next great manager, it may very well change the very way we think about coaching qualifications and development. Stay tuned.

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Category: World Football