Deco: “Fernando Santos was the most important manager of my career” | OneFootball

Deco has no hesitation in choosing the most important coach of his career. The former Portugal international highlighted Fernando Santos’s decisive role in transforming the way he played when he was just 19 or 20 years old, summing it up like this: “He was the most important one.”

Looking back on the early steps of his journey, Deco recalled the shift from an instinctive kind of football, driven mainly by the pleasure of having the ball, to a more complete understanding of the game. In that memory, Fernando Santos appears as the figure who worked on raw material that had yet to be refined and added tactical awareness to it.

The midfielder arrived at Alverca with a spontaneous approach and little concern for the game’s balance. Then at FC Porto, he found in Fernando Santos the level of demand that would change that relationship with football.

“He was the most important one, he transformed my idea of the game. Before, I only thought about playing for fun, taking people on, I lost the ball a lot,” Deco recalled.

That influence was not limited to an abstract idea. It was built through daily insistence, correction, and a level of demand that Deco also associates with the coach’s temperament.

“And Fernando Santos, with his bad mood in the morning, arguing, insisting, giving me a hard time, he was the one who influenced me most to start analyzing the game, to see tactics. I needed that, I was 19, 20 years old.”

The portrait is as affectionate as it is direct: behind the bad mood and the scoldings, Deco identifies the method that forced him to look beyond individual impulse. Fernando Santos thus emerges as the coach who taught him how to interpret the game.

Before that meeting, Mário Wilson had already left his mark at Alverca, though through a very different approach. If one nurtured freedom and confidence, the other added the missing dimension.

“Before that I had Mário Wilson, who was a dreamer, he said that everything I did was good. Santos brought that.”

The comparison does not diminish Mário Wilson’s influence, but it helps define the contrast. Deco recognizes two complementary stages: first, the encouragement of creativity; then, the level of demand needed to organize and complete that talent.

José Mourinho and Luiz Felipe Scolari also appear among the former midfielder’s most influential coaches. Even so, Deco draws an essential distinction: by the time he worked with both, he already considered himself a fully formed player.

“Mourinho later was a revolutionary, Scolari too, but I was already made. Fernando Santos took something raw and helped me become a complete player.”

It is on that question of timing that Deco’s choice rests. Mourinho and Scolari had influence at a later stage, but Fernando Santos stepped in at the moment when talent was still searching for shape, discipline, and tactical understanding.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇵🇹 here.