1.5 The fall and rise of Bruno de Carvalho - The difficult second album

A quick recap for you all, in part one of the rise and fall of Bruno de Carvalho we learned how he rose to become the club president which allegedly had been his dream since childhood. In part two we followed his first full season in charge of the club where his first mister Leonardo Jardim led Sporting to a second place finish only to resign before he was pushed owing to his relationship with his boss having completely deteriorated over the course of 12 months. In part three we followed Portugal's bright young thing Marco Silva in his first season of a four year contract which culminated in a third place finish, one place lower than Jardim. However Bruno de Carvalho could at least point to his first title win as club president when they lifted the Taça de Portugal having come back from 2-0 down to Braga and win on penalties after extra time. Was he pleased? Well maybe, but not so much that he hadn't been holding secret talks with another coach behind Silva's back and promptly fired the young mister four days after the Taça win citing just cause which included Silva not wearing his official club suit for a game against Vizela five months earlier. Some shit you really couldn't make up. Finally in part four we learned how Bruno de Carvalho had done the unthinkable and sold his soul to the devil which is ironic given the name of his new mister. Step forward Benfica's most successful ever coach, one Jorge Jesus. This wasn't after a firebreak where Jesus had done a tour of other clubs in between and maybe wouldn't be seen as so controversial. Oh no, de Carvalho announces him as the new Sporting mister 24 hours after his renewal talks with Benfica broke down when they wanted to renew his contract on reduced terms. That despite ten, yes count them, ten title wins, back to back league titles, back to back domestic trebles and leading them to back to back Europa League finals. He was at the time already Portugal's highest paid mister and despite Sporting still being in debt to the tune of millions of Euros, offered him a salary of €5m per season on a 3 year contract. Nice work if you can get it. Having backed Silva to the tune of some €18m in investment in the playing squad the summer before, making Jesus the highest paid coach saw a reduction of spending to around €11m twelve months later. Thing started brightly enough as Jesus beat his old side 1-0 in the Supertaça to earn him his first title as the new mister of Sporting. However defeat in March at home to Benfica would ultimately cost them the holy grail of the league title by just two points and to compound the lions misery, it was Benfica who completed the three-peat. Bruno de Carvalho had rolled the dice and failed. Jesus failed to get Sporting through the Champions League qualifiers and their Europa League run lasted one round past the group phase. They relinquished their Taça de Portugal title, losing after extra time 4-3 to Braga and for the third straight season under Bruno de Carvalho's leadership failed to even make it past the group phase of the Taça da Liga. Unlike the previous two seasons, de Carvalho facing a potential €10m bill if he fired a coach for the third straight summer, was left with no choice going into the 2016/17 season. Jorge Jesus would remain once more be the mister of Sporting Clube de Portugal.

So what did Bruno de Carvalho do going into the campaign knowing Jorge Jesus was tied into the most lucrative contract of any coach in Portuguese domestic club history? Well in May of 2016 he announced that despite the failure to win anything other the Supertaça (which as we've already established only counts if you win it) that he'd not only renewed Jesus' contract, but was now paying him a whopping €6m a season up €1m on the season before. That is the same €1m in total that he'd been paying Marco Silva per annum before he was sacked to leave for Olympiacos where unlike Jesus, the young Portuguese coach guided his side to a league title win. So this season has to bring with it the league title and break their big city rivals' stranglehold on the league. Seeing your rivals win the league for three straight seasons is a hard enough pill to swallow. Having to do it with their ex-coach now in charge earning a whopping €6m a season is something else altogether and at some point the natives are going to get restless. This season could also potentially end de Carvalho's four year term as the club president following his election in March 2013 which would see members vote once more at the end of that cycle in the March of 2017 but we'll get to that later.

Sidebar - As I've already alluded to in previous posts, having been bemused as to why the club president was sitting on the bench during games and why the players wore their first names on the back of the shirts, at some point I was also to learn that Portuguese football fans wave white hankies to show their dismay in the stands and just when I thought I'd seen it all. Portuguese football - the gift that keeps on giving. Still with what was to come later in his reign as Club President, the waving of hankies would be seen as way more preferable to what eventually ends up occurring. But we're not quite there yet in our story.

Behind the scenes Bruno de Carvalho had managed to renegotiate a major €515m TV rights deal which saved the club from near bankruptcy. From day one in charge de Carvalho had refused to kowtow to the demands of football agents and blamed the club's previous decline on its dependency on them. This might well explain his lack of signings in his first season coupled with shall we say, some somewhat left field signings in the second summer. To clarify: By left field I'm not talking Nuno Santos type left field either. Despite his claims, in the summer and winter transfer windows of 2017/18 you have to imagine he was taking an awful lot of meetings with agents, some of which would help swell the club coffers by staggering amounts of money. De Carvalho had previously declared war on Portugal's super agent Jorge Mendes making him persona non grata at the club and flatly refused to deal with him. He told William Carvalho he wouldn't be offered a new deal unless he parted company with Mendes as his agent and the midfielder duly obliged signing with Pere Guardiola (and yes, in case you were wondering, his brother is one and the very same. Football isn't immune to nepotism.) Adrien Silva and João Mario were forced to act likewise. De Carvalho boasted “I did great business last summer without Mendes' help.” It must be pointed out that the truth of that statement lies mostly in the head of the club president. It should go on record that de Carvalho alongside the TV deal had managed to also recover percentages of the transfer rights that were held by various funds and agents although I will caveat that by saying he was assisted by the FIFA mandate implemented on May 1st, 2015 which banned the practice of third party ownership of players. Still he did also pursue a course of renewing the contracts with the best prospects from the clubs academy.

João Mario the heartbeat of the Sporting midfield was sold for a whopping €44.78m to Internazionale which dwarfed the €10m received for the transfer of Ricky van Wolfswinkel to Norwich City. As does the sale of top goalscorer Islam Slimani to Leicester City for a further €33m. Naldo goes to Krasnador for €4.5m, Elias to Atlético-MG for €2.5m. Stuttgart pay a loan fee of €1.65 for the youngster Carlos Mané, Andre Felipe goes to Sport Recife for €1.2m. Guitiérrez is loaned to Rosario Central for €500,000, Tanaka returns to Japan with Vissel Kobe for €430,000, future Sporting boss João Pereira went to Trabzonspor for €300,000. Ewerton’s loan to Kaiserslautern brought in €200,000, Wallyson on loan to Standard Liege €125,000 and Simeon Slavchev, remember him? Yes left field Slavchev! Well he was off to Lechia Gdansk on loan for a fee of €50,000. Combined this helps generate an income of €87.23m.

With Slimani gone they turned to 27 year old Dutch forward Bas Dost signing him for €11.85m from Wolfsburg. We added another Ruiz in Andy signing from San Lorenzo for €4.84m. Coates' loan from Sunderland was made permanent for €4.72m, Paulo Baptista cost €3.5m from E C Bahia. €2.5m apiece spent on Elias from Corinthians and Luc Castaignos from Frankfurt. Lukas Spalvis cost €1.61m from Aalborg BK, André Felipe €1m from Corinthians. Douglas €1m from Trabzonspor, Radoslav Petrovic again €1m from Dynamo Kiev. Finally Marcelo Meli on loan from Boca Juniors cost €270,000.

Beto joins on a free from Sevilla and they take two Premier League players on loan, Joel Campbell from Arsenal and Lazar Markovic from Liverpool. Eleven players are loaned out, 3 go on free transfers, 1 released and Douglas was banned having failed a doping test in April 2017 and the Portuguese Anti-Doping Authority imposed a two year suspension.

Total outlay €34.8m for a net spend of -€52.43m. So this time the club could maybe afford the misters salary a little easier but Jesus will still have to go some way to justify all €6m he's now being paid which I'm sure came also with some sort of potential bonus structure.

Pre-season commenced in Switzerland on July 13th, 2016 where they faced AS Monaco coached by? Yes, one and the same Leonardo Jardim and his side from the principality won 4-1. Stade Lyonnais were beaten 3-1 but that proved to be the only highlight of the four games played in the country. Zenit Saint Petersburg won 4-2 and to compound their misery they were spanked 5-0 by PSV. Good job it was only pre-season. They lost 1-0 to Lyon, 4-3 on penalties to Villarreal in Spain after a 0-0 draw. In the Troféu Cinco Violinos they beat Bas Dost’ old team Wolfsburg 2-1. The Ibérica Cup was lost 3-2 to Real Betis (oh no) but presumably they shared the Algarve Summer Cup with Nice after a 0-0 draw (hurrah!).

So after missing out on the Liga title by 2 points and with Jorge Jesus renewing his contract it was time to deliver on the pitch and bring the title back to the right half of Lisboa this time around. For the first time under de Carvalho's presidency they win their opening 4 games including a 2-1 win in O Clássico at home. Then disaster strikes in round 5 as they lose 3-1 to Rio Ave although then they did at least beat Estoril 4-2. Three draws follow and in Portugal winning 18 points from your opening 27 available is basically game over in terms of a title challenge and they're not even in November. They do at least rally to win the next 3 games but they commit the cardinal sin of losing the Dérbi 2-1 on December 11th, 2016 and de Carvalho's decision to not only renew with Jorge Jesus but on an increased wage had already blown up in his face. Braga compounded his misery with a 1-0 win in the next game on Matchday 14. Sporting had dropped 15 points from 42. Their title bid was officially done and it was December 18th.

They lost O Clássico at the Dragão 2-1 on Matchday 20 and at least avoided defeat in the Dérbi at home on April 23rd drawing 1-1. Matchday 32 saw them lose 3-1 at the José Alvalade to Belenenses and 2-1 away the next game to Feirense. Jorge Jesus’ second season record read: Played 34, won 21, drawn 7, lost 6. GF 68, GA 36. Despite it being a complete disaster, this being Portugal it was still good enough for a 3rd placed finish and a spot in the Champions League qualifiers for the next season. But really it was a fucking disaster and had de Carvalho not re-signed his coach to the largest contract in all of Portugal you have to imagine he'd have been gone by December. He had after all considered sacking Marco Silva by the same point in the December when he was the mister. To compound the misery of the Sporting fans Benfica won a fourth straight league title. The irony of that season would be that despite being Champions, Benfica would draw 7 times losing twice and Porto in second would draw 10 losing twice. That meant Sporting only finished six points off Porto and twelve off Benfica. I say only, but contextually you'd expect the gap to both to be far worse than it was. It was in short a relatively crap year for Portuguese football but crapper for Sportinguistas and their club by far.

They lost in the quarter finals of the Taça de Portugal to Chaves and for the fourth season straight under de Carvalho failed to make it out of the group phase of the Taça da Liga. That honour went once more to Setúbal.

In the Champions League they finished bottom of a group with Borussia Dortmund, Real Madrid and Legia Warsaw. That was despite the Polish side conceding 24 times compared to 8 from Sporting over the 6 games. They twice lost 2-1 to Real Madrid. 2-1 at the José Alvalade and 1-0 away to BVB. In Poland, Legia won 1-0. The lions only win and therefore only game that they didn't lose was a 2-0 at home to Legia. Fucking shower of shit. Not even a parachute into the Europa League to spare their blushes.

And not even a Supertaça to save Jesus this season having neither won the Taça de Portugal or the league title the previous season.

On March 3rd, 2017 the Independent published an article by Jack Pitt-Brooke on Bruno de Carvalho in which he begins by saying that he is - outspoken, confrontational, unpredictable and abrasive. He is a hero to his supporters but is accused of demeaning his prestigious office by those who look down their noses at him. He is either a brash populist standing up for his people or an unseemly loudmouth with deep psychological issues, depending on who you believe. De Carvalho is the Donald Trump of Portuguese football.

The article highlights his commitment to the academy and his want for governing body UEFA to do more to support and protect producing clubs, the principle of which is hard to argue against and to be fair the same goes with his war on agents but to ever win that particular battle takes collective agreement from all clubs which won't ever happen.

The article quotes Vasco Loyrenco, a former sporting advisor to the club claiming de Carvalho was a “psychiatric case” for sacking Silva which made him ashamed of the club.

The piece ends with the final line - The blustering, arguing, constantly-vaping 45 year old is certainly not to everyone's taste.

One imagines that both the misters Jardim and Silva would certainly testify to that. He is as we would say in England - Marmite.

Pitt-Brookes article was released one day before the elections on March 4th, 2017. Pedro Madeira Rodrigues is the candidate standing against Bruno de Carvalho for election. Also 45 years of age he's a father of five, he was the Secretary-general of the Portuguese Chamber of Commerce and industry for over a decade. Rodrigues was once in the club's academy system as a child footballer for three years. The candidate announces if he wins the election, he plans to replace Jesus with Tottenham's Juande Ramos. Not sure how many votes that would added to his candidacy. As for de Carvalho, he ran under the slogan 'Sporting on the right track.' Maybe it's catchier in Portuguese. Hardly sounds inspiring, but then again neither does hiring Juande Ramos. Touche! In the end it was an overwhelming victory for the existing current president. 18,755 members would vote of which 86.13% cast their votes for him to remain.

I said you'd have to hold onto your hat in part one and apologies it's taken a while to get there but in the next post we're getting all the more closer to being treated to the mother of all fireworks displays. These ones I can promise you are not to be missed. Nero will be playing the fiddle whilst Rome burns.