What a blunder, São Paulo! Barcellos leaves U20s, 3 titles, 70% | OneFootball

São Paulo, and its fans, were taken by surprise this Tuesday (24) by the request to leave made by coach Allan Barcellos, who was in charge of the U-20 team and had been promised by the club since the beginning of the year that he would be integrated into the senior squad.

That integration never happened, Barcellos grew upset and will leave São Paulo, most likely to take over the youth setup of rival Palmeiras, which has been sounding out the coach for several months and currently has an opening in its U-20 team.

There is one and only one party responsible for the split: São Paulo, which promised what it did not deliver and is now losing one of the most promising coaches of the new generation.

Barcellos' numbers speak for themselves. After working his way through the U-13 to U-17 levels in Cotia, he finally took charge of São Paulo’s U-20 team in 2024, the year in which he had already won the youth Copa do Brasil title.

In 2025 came his crowning achievement, winning the Copinha, the biggest youth tournament in the country, in addition to a second straight U-20 Copa do Brasil title at the end of the year. Then, at the start of 2026, he finished as runner-up in the Copa São Paulo de Juniores.

The coach’s campaign in charge of the U-20 side is impressive. There were 98 matches, with 60 wins, 24 draws and 14 losses, for an incredible 69.4% success rate. His team scored 246 goals and conceded 105. A hallmark of his excellent work, the average possession rate was also high, at 58.1% in matches.

The departure comes as a surprise, since at the beginning of this year, Barcellos had signed a contract extension with Tricolor until the end of 2027. However, according to AVANTE MEU TRICOLOR, some promises not kept by the board, such as his transition to the club’s senior team, upset the coach, who decided to leave São Paulo.

Feeling that the process of moving from the youth setup to the senior squad was not being carried out at São Paulo, he chose to seek a fresh start and is expected to accept the challenge of managing Palmeiras.

According to sources heard by AMT, the arrival of Roger Machado at Tricolor had no influence on Barcellos’ decision, who truly decided to leave because of promises São Paulo failed to keep over the last two years, more specifically in the last three months.

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