THE Coach Paulo Fonseca returns today to a ‘great’ of Portuguese football 12 and a half years later, when he joined Sporting, arriving more experienced after a step back in his career and contact with two of the main European championships.
Successor to Rui Borges, whose contract termination with the ‘Lions’ began to be negotiated on Sunday, the coach leaves behind 21 months at Lyon, which is also at the bottom of the French League podium.
Paulo Fonseca, 53 years old, returns to Portugal a decade after leaving Sporting de Braga, for which he won a Portuguese Cup in 2015/16, in a penalty shoot-out victory against FC Porto, precisely the first ‘big’ club led by the former central defender.
Before his rise on the bench, the Nampula-born coach played between 1991 and 2005 for Barreirense, Vitória de Guimarães, Estrela da Amadora, Leça, Belenenses and MarÃtimo – the last three on loan from FC Porto, whose senior team he never represented -, after a formative journey in Barreiro teams, where he grew up since leaving Mozambique at the age of one.
Paulo Fonseca launched himself as a coach at Estrela’s under-19s and coached 1.º Outubro, Odivelas and Pinhalnovense, in which he reached the quarter-finals of the Portuguese Cup in 2009/10 and 2010/11, followed by his debut in the professional ranks with Desportivo das Aves, which came close to promotion to the I League, and his arrival at the top division Paços de Ferreira in 2012/13.
Against expectations, the Pacenses had their best campaign ever in the top flight, finishing in third place, with 54 points in 30 rounds, and accessing the preliminary play-offs of the Champions League for the only time, also reaching the ‘semi-finals’ of the Portuguese Cup.
These achievements attracted the interest of the then three-time national champion FC Porto, who exchanged VÃtor Pereira for Paulo Fonseca, coming off his debut in the I League and five years after working in the III Division, the fourth Portuguese tier at the time.
The ‘dragons’ started 2013/14 with the victory of the Supertaça Cândido de Oliveira, but failed in the fight for the ‘tetra’ and changed after nine months, on the day of the coach’s 41st birthday, when they were third in the championship and were already nine points behind leader Benfica.
Accused of alleged unpreparedness for such a big step in his career, Paulo Fonseca returned months later where he had been happy and returned Paços to the first half of the I League, far from the problems of the previous season.
The demand and visibility grew again in 2015/16, when he led Sporting de Braga to win the Portuguese Cup 50 years later and to the ‘quarters’ of the Europa League, before starting to gain experience outside the country, at Shakhtar Donetsk, which had defeated the Minho team in the continental competition.
In three seasons in Ukraine, where he succeeded the legendary Romanian Mircea Lucescu, Paulo Fonseca celebrated many other ‘doubles’ and a Super Cup, in addition to once reaching the ‘eighth’ of the Champions League, a goal never achieved by the ‘miners’ and which made the coach fulfill his promise to appear at a press conference dressed as Zorro.
The journey continued in Italy, with two seasons at Roma (2019-2021), in which he was a semi-finalist in the Europa League, and only a midfielder at AC Milan (2024), hampered by tensions with the squad, with each of these clubs giving way to the Portuguese José Mourinho and Sérgio Conceição, respectively.
The double stay in Serie A was interspersed with stages in France, with Lille (2022-2024) reaching the ‘quarters’ of the Conference League and accessing the preliminary rounds of the Champions League, a goal reissued in Lyon, in which the best international performance was the top 8 in the Europa League.
Despite not having won trophies, Paulo Fonseca achieved a sequence of 13 victories in all competitions in 2024/25, the best since 2006/07, the season of his sixth of seven consecutive French champion titles.
This milestone took place in a context of financial restrictions and after the coach served a nine-month suspension in domestic competition matches, for touching his head to a referee during protests, in a sanction known on the day he turned 52 and which removed him from the technical areas, leading Portuguese assistant Jorge Maciel to guide the team from the bench.
With offensive ideas and accustomed to projecting young players, Paulo Fonseca has already been associated with the interest of English clubs, but returns to Portugal – where he fled with his wife and one of his children in 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – and is the seventh effective coach under Frederico Varandas’ presidency at Sporting, which is coming off a season without achievements and is nine points behind the champion and isolated leader FC Porto after 10 rounds.
Paulo Fonseca will try to prove his evolution, and when he faced contexts of greater pressure and demand in the fight for trophies, he did not last long at FC Porto and AC Milan, two former European champions.
