Wolves manager Nuno on building a winning team

Wolves manager Nuno Espirito Santo reveals his personal philosophy of football and the secrets of building a winning side. Sam Wallace reports

‘When the guy comes [late], we wait. Nobody claps. We start. No one is late again’

‘A tweet or a post of a player can really harm you – it is really that simple’

A simple idea that inverts an old convention in football, and as Nuno Espirito Santo explains it in a meeting room at Wolverhampton Wanderers’ training ground this week, it makes you wonder how many other managers might consider adopting it.

Nuno, as everyone calls him, does not fine his players for being late for training. The Wolves manager does not see the point. “Money, for a footballer, is not an issue,” he says, and suggests a hypothetical situation. “You have a big star, he comes five minutes late and I say, ‘OK, I’m going to fine you £5,000’ and he goes, ‘Tomorrow, I’ll come 10 minutes late, and the day after I’ll come 15. Are you going to fine me?’”

Instead, Nuno, based on 30 years in the game as a goalkeeper and latterly a manager, has a different approach: everyone waits. “Waiting, waiting, waiting,” he says. “F------ freezing, waiting. When the guy comes, nobody claps. I ask, ‘OK, are you ready to work? We’ve been waiting for you. We start now that you are here’. It works. No argument, no conflict. Nothing.”

Nuno says no one is late anymore. “Never,” he says. “I can assure you”. And for a moment he smiles, reflecting on the curious nature of the game that he has played, observed and coached since he grew up on the west African island of Sao Tome.

The 46-year-old veteran of Jose Mourinho’s great, early 2000s Porto side, a club he himself managed before Wolves, has agreed to a rare audience to discuss his life, and over two hours a very different man emerges.

This is Nuno away from the grind of post-match interviews when he often seems to be answering through gritted teeth, with the embattled look of a storm-tossed, trawler skipper. Wolves are one of the great Premier League success stories, into the Europa League last 16, and much of that has to do with their Portuguese coach.

Wolves play Mourinho’s Tottenham Hotspur tomorrow, an association with an old boss that often tends to define Nuno, although there is much more to him than that. During the conversation it turns out he can speak Russian, the consequence of 18 months with Dynamo Moscow.

He tells us how Jorge Mendes, the super agent, got his first break by driving three hours to intercept the president of Deportivo La Coruna outside his favourite restaurant – just to persuade him to buy Nuno. He explains his coaching philosophy and his dream of a “non-conflict environment”.

“All my life I lived in an environment of conflict,” he reflects, “I’m a survivor by nature”. A surprise, it is pointed out, given that press conferences can often feel like the prelude to a conflict. “Now I’m feeling relaxed,” Nuno says, “but you have to realise, us managers, when we go to press conferences, we know if the game was good or bad, and what’s going to come. If you are frustrated or angry it’s not easy sometimes to be confronted with these stupid questions that don’t make sense at all.” He pauses for a moment for the laughter in the room. “It’s true!” he says.

If one were to describe his approach it would be a striving to challenge the orthodoxies of the game that he spent his life observing – mostly from the bench. He was a reserve goalkeeper for much of his club career and all his brief time as an unused member of Portugal squads. He knows what it is like not to play, and how the different agendas and personalities in a squad can bring them down or drive them on.

Wolves operate one of the smallest squads in the league, with just 18 core players, and Nuno believes in the future he may need fewer.

“When you look at the statistics of different teams, no matter which countries, you see the highest number is around 14 or 15 players used. And it doesn’t change. So what is that telling you? Let’s have a strong investment in preventing injuries but at the same time you don’t have to worry, because all the players are involved.”

This is the key for Nuno – a club where no player goes into a tactics meeting or steps on to a team bus knowing there is no prospect of him playing a part in a game. In his day, Nuno says, players were left out with what he says was no more than “a s--- conversation, a hand on the head, a clap on the shoulder”. He estimates he played no more than 50 per cent of the games his teams were involved in but players are different now – they want the reasons for decisions.

“It’s not that we were dumb, my generation. We just didn’t spend so much time involved in the game and around the game. I feel now the players are more around the game and they understand.”

Nuno left just one player – Jonny – behind for the trip to Espanyol in Spain for the second leg of the round-of-32 Europa League tie that Wolves won 6-3 on aggregate.

“If I had four or five players off, I would only see them again [on] Friday,” Nuno says. “So it would be Wednesday, Thursday, without any contact. Even if a member of staff stays here, when you regroup, those [left behind] are totally different psychologically, physically, in humour, dynamic. So there is a clash … you get the players that were not involved in the game plus the players that stayed here. Problems.”

In Nuno’s experience it is not just about the grievances of a player on the fringe, it can even be a case of two who are best friends “and one”, he says, “starts suffering for the other who is left out”.

He adds: “The training sessions of the players that are not involved in games are the worst ones, and the more dangerous ones because this is where the s--- happens.” What does he mean by more dangerous? “Conflict”, he replies.

He says he was “no angel” as a player but did his best to be a good team-mate. He would volunteer to stand in for the strikers’ finishing practice to take the burden off the first-choice goalkeeper.

At Porto he helped talk teen prodigy Ricardo Quaresma out of conspiracy theories he developed that certain team-mates refused to pass him the ball. “As a boy he was living in constant conflict.” Nuno, the reserve goalkeeper who observed everything, resolved to be different. “We cooperate to compete” is his mantra.

“It’s such a tiny, fine margin,” he says. “A tweet or post of a player can really harm you. Something that is so simple. If you allow these things to happen, even live in the fear that they might happen, you are f-----. You are f-----. So I try everything the other way around. And work on basic things, on simple things that were our life before. Like a family, no?”

Nuno’s family were a “powerful” one in Sao Tome, off the coast of Guinea. His parents had to move to Portugal after independence was declared but the memories of his life there up to the age of seven are vivid. He talks about the island’s rush hour when his grandmother would order him to stop playing football in the street. “Five cars,” he said, “and that was the traffic over.”

“I can tell you what I felt. Freedom. No danger. Skin. The touch of the skin. We were very physical because you almost walk around in the streets naked. The need of contact is something I still feel that I need. The weather, of course. It was one road and then the beach. Three houses away was my grandmother, four houses was my uncle. In the street there were no cars. If you wanted to play football with a guy that lived six houses away you just shouted to him. And you played on the beach, in the road.”

As a goalkeeper he played in Spain and Portugal for seven clubs, as well as the Moscow stint, and his move from Vitoria Guimaraes to Deportivo in 1997 was also significant for a young nightclub owner who wanted a break in the football agent world. That was a 31-year-old Mendes, whose GestiFute company now represents some of the game’s biggest stars, including Cristiano Ronaldo and Mourinho, but back then would drive three hours for a 10-minute chat with the Deportivo president, Augusto Cesar Lendoiro.

“The president had dinner in the same restaurant so Jorge would go from my house, every night, to speak with him,” Nuno says. “Sometimes he came back to give me feedback. Jorge owned a nightclub. I think the first time I met him was there. A friend of mine said, ‘I think you’re good, I’m going to introduce you to someone

‘That is why Mourinho is so good. He saw we had spirit and he did not mess with it’

who can help you’. Jorge was also starting. I was one of the first clients and the big one, who earned him money to pay his licence, was me.”

The peak of his playing career was at the Porto team Mourinho built, winning the Uefa Cup in 2003 and the Champions League the year after. It made Mourinho’s name, although the effect was less spectacular for Nuno, an unused substitute in both finals. What he remembers most was the spirit, a team who would go to lunch after training together every day rather than return home.

“Mourinho was not there, but he knew we had lunch. Sometimes at the club dinner [in the evening] everybody was only eating soup because at lunch we ate everything. We were full. That’s why he [Mourinho] is so good – because he read it and he saw it was something that the players had together. He didn’t mess with it.

“The lunches were productive. It was almost like we were building bonds of commitment to what was coming next. I remember every conversation would finish with the game, what we were going to do. Like, ‘Ah, are you going to score?’ ‘I bet you don’t score’. That sort of thing. That’s why I think it is all about [team spirit]. When special people meet and they gel, you have something special. It’s up to you to manage and make decisions but the beginning is that.”

Nuno took his coaching badges in the Scottish seaside town of Largs, as Mourinho had done years before, and led Rio Ave to two cup finals in his first job. At Valencia he had a fourth-place finish in the league, at Porto, where he was deemed less successful, a second place.

His achievements at Wolves will likely lead to other opportunities although he is by no means in a rush. His son is now studying in Manchester. He goes back to Portugal when he can from his home near Wolves’ training ground in the Compton area of the city.

He knows that he cannot hide his emotions and it impacts those around him.

“They know when I’m not good. I’m silent.” He mimes a look of anguish. “I look at people and think, ‘This guy feels that I’m really p----d off ’. I am.”

He is fiercely driven and has a clear idea of what he wants – that being the perfect harmonious football environment.

And after that career is over, a life like the one he grew up with, where there was no conflict at all.

“I’m looking forward to living like that again. When I stop I want to live the same patterns. With freedom, with simple things. One switch turns one light off and that’s it.”