Villas-Boas: “There are no favoured agents anymore” | OneFootball

André Villas-Boas delivered a firm message on two sensitive issues in FC Porto’s life: the relationship with agents and the construction of the future high-performance center in Gaia. In an intervention marked by pragmatism, the president explained how the market has evolved, rejected the existence of intermediaries with special status, and acknowledged the financial obstacles delaying an infrastructure considered essential for development. At its core, he summed it all up in one blunt reply: “No, there no longer are.”

At a time when the club is trying to balance the present and the future, André Villas-Boas laid out a vision stripped of romanticism and grounded in realism. Between the growing instability of the representation market and the need to finance a major project, the message was clear: FC Porto is adapting to a changing football world, with no shortcuts or privileges.

Asked about FC Porto’s current policy regarding agents, Villas-Boas responded with a broad reading of the transformations in the sector. Rather than limiting himself to the club’s practice, he framed it within a changing ecosystem, where relationships have become more fluid and interests more scattered.

“FC Porto works with everyone. And that is another of the major changing phenomena in football today. Because players move between agencies. In other words, the bond of commitment, of loyalty, with the person who first identified you and who would take you through to the end of your career, no longer exists. Players are approached by other agents with compensation to join their agencies, because those agents also do their own ‘scouting’ regarding potential talent and what they may yield in the future. There has been a break in the umbilical relationship with the agent who discovered the talent and stayed until the end of the career. Players are now approached by other agents and that is why we see so many changes. That is the first phenomenon,” he said. “The second is that funds began buying player agencies. So basically there are one, two, three funds that practically control 20 football agencies. And that is the new vehicle through which we may see even more dynamic and specific changes between clubs, driven by the interests of certain funds in placing certain players in certain clubs. So these are all new issues and new phenomena.”

The picture he described is of a market that is less emotional, more fragmented, and exposed to new forms of influence. By setting out this context, Villas-Boas suggested that FC Porto’s position stems less from an ideological choice and more from the need to deal with a reality that no longer follows old loyalties.

When directly asked whether there are preferred agents, the president was brief and categorical, reducing the matter to the essentials of the contractual relationship between player and representative.

“No, there no longer are. It is basically the player’s representative.”

The answer dismisses any notion of informal hierarchies or privileged channels. In Villas-Boas’s reading, the club deals with the concrete reality of each player, without placing agents in a position of preference.

From the structure of the market, the focus shifted to the infrastructure FC Porto wants to build in Gaia. Speaking about youth development and the high-performance center, Villas-Boas combined ambition with caution, acknowledging the scale of the project and the financial burden attached to it.

“It is a long and difficult process, above all because of FC Porto’s lack of economic capacity to self-finance the project. Our challenge is to choose the financial vehicle to build the training center. FC Porto did two things. One, it paid with its own capital for the purchase of the land, thus owning the High-Performance Center. It also paid out of its own pocket for the earthmoving works, which still have nine months ahead, due to the slope associated with the land. Building a training center of that size will cost between 40 and 50 million euros, also as a result of rising costs.”

The president also stressed that the construction timeline is far from comfortable. The ambition remains, but the pace is dictated by the need to find the right financial formula.

“Hardly. We are in the field choosing that financial vehicle in order to move forward with its construction. But it is a major issue for us.”

More than a promise, what remained was an acknowledgment of limits. FC Porto has already gone as far as it could on its own, but the next step requires a different scale of response, which helps explain why the project continues to be presented as a priority without being treated as an immediate certainty.

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