Nuno Espirito Santo won it all under Jose Mourinho but it is Jesualdo Ferreira - the man Mourinho once likened to a donkey - who is his true coaching mentor. Watch Wolves vs Tottenham live on Sky Sports Main Event from 7pm on December 27; kick-off 7.15pm
Thursday 24 December 2020 16:10, UK
When Wolves host Tottenham on Sunday, the game will pit Nuno Espirito Santo against former boss Jose Mourinho and bring with it familiar questions about the role that the latter played in shaping the coaching ideas of the former. That is understandable given that it was under Mourinho that Nuno won a Champions League winners' medal with Porto in 2004.
But it was during Nuno's second spell at Porto between 2007 and 2010 that his plans for a career in coaching really began to formulate. Those three seasons were spent working under the veteran Jesualdo Ferreira. Indeed, upon his retirement as a player with Porto, Nuno duly followed Ferreira to Malaga and Panathinaikos, working as his goalkeeper coach.
"He was a big influence," Nuno tells Sky Sports.
"A big, big influence. He was an inspiration to me."
Nuno speaks of his great respect when asked about Mourinho, but the praise is more effusive when it comes to Ferreira. While that makes sense given their close relationship, there is a certain irony to all of this given Mourinho's past comments about the man.
There is an infamous quote from Mourinho that appeared in the Portuguese newspaper Record back in February 2005 that has come to be forever associated with Ferreira.
"One is a coach with a 30-year career, the other with a three-year one," began Mourinho's column, discussing the relative success of two unnamed coaches in a thinly-veiled critique. "The one with 30 years has never won anything. The one with three years has won a lot. The one who has coached for 30 years has an enormous career. The one with three years has a small career. The one with a 30-year career will be forgotten when he ends it. The one with three could end it right now and he could never be erased from history.
"This could be the story of a donkey who worked for 30 years but never became a horse."
At the time, Mourinho's animosity was perceived to dated back to his refusal to take the Benfica job in 2002 because of the club's insistence that Ferreira be retained as his assistant.
Mourinho had been a student at the Lisbon Superior Institute for Physical Education in the 1980s when Ferreira was one of the teachers. But he so wanted his own staff at Benfica that he is said to have offered up some comical reasons for being unable to work with Ferreira.
During the second meeting about returning to Benfica, Mourinho even suggested that he would not be comfortable swearing in front of his old instructor on the training ground.
"Of course that was only an excuse," Manuel Vilarino, the Benfica president at the time, would later suggest. "He just did not want to work with Jesualdo Ferreira."
Mourinho has sought to downplay talk of a feud ever since.
Every time that the pair have gone head-to-head in the Champions League and La Liga, the old quotes have resurfaced but Ferreira is on record in regarding the matter as having long since been resolved and the pair have maintained cordial relations away from the cameras.
It no doubt helps that the 74-year-old Ferreira has proven Mourinho wrong.
The initial newspaper column appeared in the week that Ferreira's Braga had lost a derby game to Vitoria Guimaraes. The popular perception at the time was that while Ferreira boasted a reputation as one of the game's great thinkers, that did not translate into results.
He was even cruelly tagged with the nicknamed Professor Pardal, a reference to a cartoon inventor in Portuguese culture whose madcap ideas rarely worked in practice.
That all changed when Ferreira achieved something that even Mourinho never managed - winning three consecutive league titles with Porto, all of them with Nuno in the squad.
Donkey, no more.
Jose Gomes was Ferreira's assistant manager during that period of unprecedented domestic success for Porto and saw up close just why he is such a respected figure in the game.
"Jesualdo is a master, you know," Gomes tells Sky Sports.
"I worked with him for six years at Benfica, Porto, Malaga and Panathinaikos. I learned a lot from him, especially when it comes to thinking tactically and working with individuals.
"He made me think a lot about that individual work that you do with the players, helping them to learn. He is really impressive, really strong in helping players to be better individually and to develop. Just look at the number of players that Porto sold thanks to his work and how those players changed and improved after working with him.
"I learned every day about his ideas. He really is a master."
It is a view oft-repeated. Ricardo Quaresma has since said that Ferreira was the coach who understood him best, recalling the long chats after training. Hulk has put it much the same. "Besides being a coach, he is a good teacher," said the powerful forward recently.
That chimes with the comments of Radamel Falcao. "It was Jesualdo Ferreira who taught me what a striker should do," said the Colombian. This is a coach who conveys ideas.
Nuno embraced that.
"He was the first manager who really showed me how to prepare a training session in the proper way," explains the Wolves manager. "We had these very long conversations. It was fantastic to speak for hours and hours about football, the triangles of the game."
After their brief time together at Panathinaikos, both Nuno and Gomes embarked on their own pathways. Nuno is at Wolves, Gomes is now in Spain with Almeria. But the old master has been more adventurous still, continuing his work as a footballing missionary.
There has been a title with Zamalek in Egypt, another in Qatar with Al Sadd. As recently as August, Ferreira was coaching Brazilian giants Santos, his passion for the game undimmed.
Now he is back in Portugal with Boavista.
"It is incredible because he is 74," says Gomes.
"He was set a challenge to go to such an enthusiastic country as Brazil with all those fans and he took that challenge on with both hands. It is a very good sign that he feels at this age that same energy and passion to be working. He is an example for other coaches."
Will Nuno still be going at that age?
Even the thought of it is enough to raise a laugh and a shake of the head.
"I don't know," he says. "You know how I go. Day to day."
Nuno Espirito Santo's Wolves host Jose Mourinho's Tottenham live on Sky Sports Premier League and Sky Sports Main Event from 7pm on Sunday; kick-off 7.15pm
