FC Porto B thrive on first-team demands, says João Brandão | OneFootball

João Brandão sees FC Porto B’s season as an unusual balancing act: competing without ever losing sight of the mission to develop players. Between matching the team’s best-ever finish, a lower average age, and the constant demands of the first team, the coach painted a picture of a challenging season marked by adaptation. At the heart of it all was the idea that summed up the conversation: “They leave this year much better prepared.”

In the specific context of a B team at a club like FC Porto, the season is always lived at two speeds: that of immediate results and that of patiently building players for higher levels. It was in that space, between the competitive urgency of the Segunda Liga and the structural role of preparing players for the first team, that João Brandão gave his reading of a year he considers positive, insisting on a word that runs through his entire speech: preparation.

Asked to give an overall assessment of the season, the coach combined the team’s collective results with what carries the most weight in a side of this profile: the development of young players and the ability to bring them closer to the club’s main reality.

“It was a positive season, because we combined the collective result with the development of our young players. The value of finishing fifth, matching our best-ever finish and points tally, and also having the highest number of wins since the league has been played with 18 teams, becomes even more significant because we also introduced 11 players under the age of 18,” he said. “We also introduced two under-17 players and lowered the average age, which in recent years had been close to 22, to 19. Taken together, it makes for a very successful season, never giving up the great purpose of the B team, which is to prepare young players for the demands of the first team. And I think that point was also achieved, with some debuts and others who are on the verge of breaking through.”

The picture he leaves is of a season in which results did not come detached from development, but precisely alongside it. It is in that balance, more than in any isolated statistic, that Brandão finds the measure of success and opens the door to the next theme: the type of football this competition forces players to learn.

Asked whether that adaptation might make the game less aesthetic or appealing, João Brandão was clear about the specificity of the Segunda Liga and what it demands from players used to more dominant settings in youth football.

“The game played by a dominant team, as ours are in youth development, is different from the Segunda Liga; it is very specific: the physical dimension, the duels, defensive organization, the way we manage the emotional incidents of the game. And that was one area where the team grew,” he explained. “It means they have to go through a phase of adaptation, but also of growth. They come out of the Segunda Liga much better prepared for the depth of the game in the demands of the first team and in professional football. We always look at it as a challenge and not an obstacle, as an opportunity and not so much as something that can stop us from performing well. Young players are highly valued and talked about for their technical quality and ability to unbalance games in attack, but they leave this year much better prepared and with a much broader range of skills for professional football.”

There is a strong idea here: the Segunda Liga does not appear as a brake, but as a workshop. Less of a showcase and more of a hard-learning environment, with more contact with everything the game has in physical, emotional, and tactical terms, in a process that Brandão sees as decisive for the next step.

When the conversation turned to the difficult start to the season, the coach pointed to several factors and described a period in which it was necessary to align methods, expectations, and competitive focus within a particularly young group.

“There were several factors that contributed. The start was difficult because a new coaching staff arrived for the first team, with a different methodology. We had to create dynamics for using our players on a daily basis and in the need to help prepare their matches,” he analyzed. “It was necessary to carry out a process of emotional balance and focus with the players. Given what football today is like around these young players, the rush they have to embrace new challenges and take the next steps, it was important to get their heads in the right place and have them fully focused on the B team. Then, being such a young team and having so many players coming from the youth system, it was important to give them time and remain very resilient and very positive in the development of these young players. This adaptive process takes time; there is no way around it.”

His diagnosis moves away from simplistic readings of an uneven start and places the emphasis on human management as much as tactics. More than expecting an immediate response, Brandão describes a process of consolidation in an environment where youth requires time and football’s surrounding reality tends to deny it.

It was when he went into detail about the weekly work that the singular nature of the B team’s role became most evident. Working alongside the first team, led by Francesco Farioli, required almost daily flexibility, sometimes sacrificing preparation for their own match.

“I’ll give the example of our match against Ac. Viseu, which coincided with Sporting-FC Porto. During the week, we were called several times to train with the first team, because we had dynamics, structures, and behaviors similar to Sporting’s. That means our match, our preparation, is not the priority,” he described. “We arrived in Viseu having had one training session in which we looked at our own dynamics and our way of playing. The whole week was developed, both in training and in video work, around behaviors that are not ours. To be even more precise, for example, in a set-piece behavior, we worked on man-to-man marking while our principle is zonal marking. During the week, we developed a back five, and then arrived at the match and that was not our defensive structure, but rather a back four. In other words, there are behaviors, whether macro or much more individual, as also happened, that make it necessary to adapt certain dynamics and strategies. And in that respect, the first team, the B team, and the club structure were fundamental in allowing us, down to the smallest detail, to minimize the side effects of this fluidity and the constant call-up of B-team players.”

Brandão also detailed how often that collaboration took place throughout the season and the variety of solutions found to respond to the first team’s needs.

“Yes, sometimes with a full team, at other times by unit, or more individually.”

The coach then explained how that work was requested by the first-team structure.

“They could call up just the defense or the full team to, mainly on the acquisition days of the week, develop the opposition and the strategic plan for the opponent facing the first team.”

More than simple occasional support, the picture drawn is of a B team deeply integrated into the club’s daily functioning. That makes the week less linear, more demanding and, at the same time, closer to what awaits these players in high-competition environments.

That led to another inevitable question: to what extent did the B team also have to incorporate ideas or principles from the first team into its own play? Brandão answered without hiding the complexity of that balance.

“That was the big step we took as a coaching staff. We always had great adaptive capacity, the ability to reflect, break things down, and prepare the next match very well, distinguishing what was essential from what was secondary,” he stressed. “To give some examples: we have our game model and principles, our structure, the behaviors we want to see developed in the different phases of the game, with the ball, without the ball, set pieces, transitions, etc. But then we had to respect what the week’s work had been, whether at collective, unit, or individual level. For example, our full-backs trained during the week with the first team in roles designed to provide width and depth down the flank; and our idea is for the full-backs to come inside and progress from deeper positions. We had to manage our game plan, because it might have been beneficial for us to have one full-back deeper and the other more advanced, but we also had to take into account what that player’s process had been during the week.”

It is in that management between identity and circumstance that Brandão places one of the season’s greatest merits. The team did not stop having a model, but it learned to live with deviations, adjustments, and compromises imposed by a reality in permanent connection with the first team.

Faced with the amount of information and the different stimuli placed on such young players in the same week, the coach rejected any tone of complaint and preferred to return to the word he repeated most throughout the conversation: opportunity.

“We always saw it as an opportunity. We never held on to complaints and excuses, but to the challenge of doing better with what we have,” he assured. “I look back and see that the coaching staff and the players are much richer in terms of knowledge of the game, much better prepared for the challenges that the game itself and the opponent create for us, as a result of this process. The diversity of behaviors they were forced to understand and develop led to tactical flexibility that, at this moment, is an advantage for us as a team, and for the players in their future.”

In the end, João Brandão’s vision rests less on the purity of the process and more on the richness it leaves behind. In a year shaped by constant call-ups, fine adjustments, and accelerated learning, FC Porto B emerges, in his reading, as a space where competing and developing did not cancel each other out; they pushed each other forward.

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