«There are a lot of people who say that I gave everything I had and what I didn’t have, but that’s not enough. A club like Sporting needs titles and I didn’t give them enough titles. The biggest regret I have in football is this.»
The quote that opens this article belongs to João Pereira and was given in interview which he granted to zerozeroshortly after hanging up his boots. He then said, don’t be in a hurry to achieve success as a coach, but just three years later he seems to be very close to taking over the Leo helm, in what will be an opportunity to tackle pending issues and erase old hurts.
We are not talking about a copy of Rúben Amorim, much less a disciple, but Sporting fans can expect some similarities between the two. After all, they followed similar trajectories, with professional football, national team and dreams of education, since a childhood in which they became friends. It is also therefore appropriate that the coach of team B, who returned to Alvalade at the invitation of this former friend, is now his successor…
Converted lion keeps coming back
On May 19, 2021, the day it was titular in the last game of Sporting’s victorious campaign, João Pereira got emotional leaving the pitch and shortly afterwards announced the end of his football career. “Sporting is a club that I learned to love,” he said, after the final whistle. It wasn’t even the first time he said something like that.
Like his predecessor, he didn’t grow up wearing the green and white shirt. He even trained at Benfica and it was on that red-black side of the city that he started playing professionally. There was Gil Vicente and SC Braga on his CV, before a transfer to Alvalade in January 2010. It was in the lion’s den that he reached his best level, reaching the national team for the first time, where he would 40 international caps e two final stages as a starter.
154 games in three spells at Sporting @Global Imagens / Jorge Amaral
He headed to La Liga, with Valencia, after two and a half years at that club where he won over the fans and was won back. In 2015/16, with Jorge Jesus at the helm, he returned for another season and a half, in the process achieving his first title for the club – a Super Cup. Four years later he returned from time to time.
It was surprising, this transfer completed in January 2021. Sporting was in first place with Pedro Porro on the right flank, but João Pereira, already a veteran and removed from the Trabzonspor squad, was the solution to give the team experience. Upon arriving for this third passage, Amorim explained the choice and glued a new nickname: «He’s a person I know well, with a very strong character. It has rotation and heart. It’s very ranhososo it fits our idea.”
João Pereira’s version of his last transfer, constructed at the last minute when everything was already in place to move to another Turkish club, is much more concise, but equally enlightening: «a fairy tale happened».
It’s not Amorim, but it follows the same road
So Rúben Amorim already knew João Pereira well at that time? In fact, the connection between the two begins earlier. Well before…
They met in 1994/95, when they joined the squad of Benfica schools. They were only 10 years old, but they forged a friendship that lasted many years. Off the field, where they spent their holidays together as children, but also on the field! They faced each other several times as seniors, but they played together more times, the last one being also the most important: both starters against Ghana (2-1) at the World Cup in Brazil.
Three wins, four draws and two defeats for team B @Sporting CP
This old friendship, combined with the fact that Amorim was João Pereira’s last coach, could well be the key to smoothing a transition that promises to be difficult. Or at least that is the ambition of Frederico Varandas, who has been eyeing the former right-back as his next head coach for some time.
João Pereira, currently coach of the B team after also leading the under-23s, has taken inspiration from the main team and set up his teams in a very similar 3-4-3. He is equally demanding of his players and interested in what is outside in terms of ideas and trends in sports training. Strong, expansive leader, although not so balanced in communication – the temperament he already had as a player is still being deconstructed.
But if the biggest regret of his playing days is not having given Sporting enough titles, he’s just in time to remedy the situation. There is no room for failure, both because of the demands of a club increasingly accustomed to triumph, and because of the demands that come from within and even from the house itself, where the wife fills the shelves with books and asks her husband to be the best.
The interview with João Pereira, published on October 14, 2021:
It would take a lot of mental contortion to see Rúben Amorim’s departure as a positive for Sporting, given the evident quality of what was being built by this coach prepared to wear the shoes of red devil. Still, the green and white fans have a valid candidate for the position in João Pereira and the keyword is what is required at the moment: continuity.
