Tiago Pinto dials in from holiday, the sun streaking in through his hotel room window.
This is the break the former AS Roma sporting director had planned when he decided to depart the Stadio Olimpico pressure cooker in January, a chance to recharge batteries after a relentless three years in the Eternal City. But even though he is thousands of miles from home, his mind isn’t wandering far from the business end of the European football season he’s just left behind.
The time was right to press pause but since February a mini market for sporting directors has opened up. Pinto, just 39 but with successful, trophy-winning stints at European heavyweights Benfica and Roma on his CV, needs to stay sharp.
Packed in among the sunscreen in his luggage are comprehensive notes from his previous job. Pinto is currently auditing his own performance in Serie A, picking out bits he might have done better.
He’s also doing his homework on the Premier League, the “dream” destination that might be where he ends up next.
“When I left Roma I thought a lot about it and I just felt it was the right time, the end of a cycle,” he tells i. He delivers the next line with a knowing smile.
“But when I made my decision everyone close to me said: ‘Knowing you like we do, I doubt you will be at peace after two weeks’. I think they were probably right….”
This is the first time in his life Pinto has been unemployed. A boyhood Benfica fan, after a short spell teaching he was hired to run their multi-sports programme, overseeing the club’s futsal, roller hockey, basketball, volleyball and handball teams.
“My route into football is very different from most people,” he says. “I studied economics and pedagogy – the practice of teaching – at university and then managed these five clubs, all with different rosters and cultures. I learned so much.”
He also proved a quick learner: in one of his five years in the role four of the clubs he ran were national champions. Club president Luis Filipe Vieira saw enough to promote him to one of the biggest jobs in Portuguese sport, running Benfica’s football business.
It sounds like a dream job but Pinto candidly, and for the first time, admits the first three months were a “living nightmare”.
“It’s the first time someone has asked me that but it wasn’t what it appeared. With multi sports I was protected because people don’t speak too much about that but in football the country lives with Benfica,” he says.
“If someone gets injured in training, all the newspapers and commentators speak about it. It was very difficult as a huge supporter.
“All my family support Benfica. My mum organised dinnertime during the weekend or when Benfica played around the games. If Benfica played at 7, we ate at 9 after the game. If Benfica lost, me and my dad didn’t eat!
“It was very difficult at the beginning. I felt so much pressure, I felt so much ‘You can’t miss now’. All my uncles, all my cousins support Benfica. But slowly I managed to learn how to do it, the president was really important but also the coach [Rui Vitoria].”
His biggest success story was creating a fast-track for the club’s glittering academy stars into the first team, including players like Ruben Dias and Joao Felix. He helped reshape and refresh the club while maintaining success on the pitch.
Roma and a chance to prove himself away from Lisbon came calling in 2021 – “It was a big challenge, but I like to take risks,” he says – and a combination of whip smart recruitment, promoting homegrown players and a sprinkling of stardust in the form of luring Jose Mourinho made it a memorable stint in Italy.
He doesn’t do many interviews and this one, his first with an English newspaper, is more than 12 months in the making, having first been requested before the Europa Conference League final they won to end their trophy drought.
Pinto’s story is intriguing and his honesty makes him a good interviewee but at Roma he says he preferred for his work to do the talking. Now time has passed he is happy to talk but it just so happens that when we do chat, Premier League jobs are starting to pop up. Liverpool and Bournemouth have vacancies and soon, Newcastle United will too.
Pinto has been linked with the director of football vacancy at St James’s Park and i understands that he is of interest to the club as they plot life after Manchester United-bound Dan Ashworth. So is it a job that would appeal?
“If a big club like Newcastle asks to speak to you, of course you’re interested,” he says.
“I know the club’s story very well because Sir Bobby Robson was a big personality in Portugal and we associated him with Newcastle. I followed the club because of that passion.
“The work the new ownership has done has been very impressive – with a clever strategy they’ve come from a relegation fight to the Champions League so there’s huge potential at Newcastle.
“I don’t know if the interest is true or not but who would say no to a project like that?”
You can see why Pinto might appeal. He’s erudite and eloquent, breaking down his philosophy for i as one of collaboration.
“I’m not the guy who goes into a club and says ‘Fire everyone and appoint people I want’. That’s not my style, I prefer to go in and learn first. A club is better if there’s a peaceful environment, everyone’s aligned,” he says.
But there is a “stubborn streak” when it comes to his core principles.
“There are three or four things that are my key pieces of a sporting strategy. The first is the academy, which something I dedicate a lot of my time and energy to,” he says.
“Sometimes it’s not normal that the scouts of the first team knows the academy. In my teams the scout for the first team should absolutely know the academy.
“In my mindset I wouldn’t sign a 19 or 17-year-old player from abroad if I have someone with the same potential inside the squad. If my scout doesn’t know that, they don’t understand what they’re doing. I believe a lot in development and homegrown players are so important for the DNA of the club and because of economic sustainability.
“Then I believe in marginal gains. The teams that win more are the teams that think more about details: the nutrition, the psychologist, the travel, the quality of the pitches where you train, your sleep.
“I’m stubborn about this. I try to say to my people – it doesn’t matter if you’re a doctor, physio, the kit manager, when you go home you need to think ‘What did I do today to help the team win at the weekend?’
“Of course this takes a lot of energy and sometimes people ask why am I so interested in this stuff? It comes from my time with a multi-sports organisation. There we didn’t have much money, we get the group we have and we worked with them until the end of the season. So you need to make them perform.
“Lastly, I want people to be aligned. I don’t like conflict. It is maybe a defect – I get involved in things that aren’t the core business of my activity but I want internal alignment of the coach, the board, all the departments.
“I believe that the more united we are, between every department, the closer we are to success.”
No conflict? How did a man who appointed and then worked with the notoriously demanding Mourinho manage that?
“Don’t get me wrong, when you work with a man with such a huge profile, it’s demanding. And he is demanding because he has achieved so much and has high standards,” he says.
“Don’t forget that I’m Portuguese and I started to work with him when I was 36. For a young sporting director to work normally with Mourinho, it’s not possible.
“I learned a lot from him. He’s one of the most important managers in the history of football. Football is like everything, you have cycles. Sometimes you agree, sometimes you disagree but no-one can minimise the great impact he had at Roma.”
Pinto does not hesitate when asked to identify Mourinho’s “X factor”.
“What really impresses you on a daily basis is what he means for people,” he says.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re in London, Reykjavik, Dubai or wherever, what Jose means to people is something amazing.
“And there are coaches who won as much or even more than him but it’s difficult to find someone who touches people’s hearts like he does.
“Here’s a small example. One day we played in Sofia in Bulgaria in the Conference League, the game was in November and the weather was terrible. It was snowing, very, very cold.
“We were winning 3-0 but in the end won 3-2, it was a very bad game. We won but with bad feelings. Everyone wants to take a shower, get a bus and go to the airport.
“It was snowing, it was midnight and when he came out from the stadium and I was looking at him he had gone 50 metres to the place where there were 100 or 200 people shouting for him.
“He went there, did photos, did autographs. I was on the bus looking at it and thought ‘This guy has won 25 titles, he’s pissed off with the game, everyone is freezing and he’s taking 15 minutes doing this thing’.
“It seems a small detail but at the end of it we work for people. The most special thing about Mourinho is how he works with people, the reaction he provokes in them.”
It helped that at Roma, transfer business on a budget was much more hit than miss. He needed to totally overhaul the squad while walking an financial fair play tightrope and brought in players of the calibre of Paulo Dybala and Tammy Abraham.
Convincing Ivory Coast centre-back Evan Ndicka, a player much in-demand, to sign for Roma after a 12-month pursuit is of particular satisfaction.
“You have to be clear with people. Money and contracts matter hugely but I try to manage the emotional side of it because there are a lot of emotions in the football business,” he says.
“Sometimes just the number of the shirt can make a difference. When we signed Tammy [Abraham] and he was close to signing for other clubs, we made sure that the first time we met him we had a shirt with his name and the number he would wear with us. Maybe that meant something to him.”
He is no Harry Redknapp-esque wheeler dealer, and agents seem to appreciate that.
“My personality, I try to be methodical. I’m not the guy who rings everyone saying ‘I might be interested in your player’ and working on lots of deals,” he says.
“An agent said to me: ‘You’re the only sporting director I know who says straight away to me that you’re not interested!'”
Perhaps his most compelling pitch to Premier League clubs is how he artfully negotiated Roma’s financial fair play predicament, bringing in more than £130m in sales to help make the club compliant with Uefa’s rules.
In the summer he had to do most of that work before a 30 June deadline without harming Mourinho’s first team. It was an exhausting business but utilising the loan market meant unwanted players were able to retain value.
“To me FFP is not an enemy,” he says.
“It’s something that influences your work but it’s not an obstacle to your work. We need to look at it globally. To protect the global business of football you need rules, you need sustainability.
“I believe in these principles because I believe we need to spend less than we generate. For me as a sporting director it’s a good starting point.
“I’m not against it. I think as an instrument it can help football be more sustainable in the future.
“These rules push you to change the role of sporting director. If ten years ago you looked to the sporting director as the guy who sees games, selects players, does transfers and that’s it. Nowadays it’s completely different. You need to be aware of regulations, you need to be able to sit on the same table as the financial guys, lawyers and understand it all or it’s difficult to do your job.
“I think FFP is needed, it’s something we cannot avoid. It stimulates your creativity, team work inside your club because you need to work with different figures to get to the settlement agreement.”
Roma was, he believes, “overall a success” but now he watches from afar hoping they manage to do something the club failed to do his time: return to the Champions League. And while he waits for the next gig, he is striving to get better.
“I learned from my first president at Benfica. I used to get very excited when we closed a deal. But he’d say to me ‘If we closed the deal, it means we could do better’.
“He meant that the moment you close the deal, the other side is happy as well and that’s not a good thing.
“You can always get a bit more, do a bit better. I think that’s a good way to look at things.”
