Dfter having been in charge of the Portuguese under-21 team for more than 14 years, the former left-back admitted, in an interview with the Lusa agency, that his first experience abroad “is going very well”.
“Another reason for pride and what makes me fall in love with what I’m doing is having a group of boys with a huge desire to learn and who until today, perhaps, haven’t had the opportunities that players in Portugal have. But very gratifying so far. It’s gratifying to feel the interest they show and how well they try to do things”, he stated.
Rui Jorge, 53 years old, was invited to prepare for participation in the 2027 Under-20 World Cup, which Azerbaijan will host together with Uzbekistan, considering that “it is a team that does not have the quality” to be in the competition, but that wants to evolve for the future.
“I immediately said that if they were waiting for a coach who said he was going to win the world championship or to win games, that I wasn’t the one they should choose. But, if they wanted a coach to try to develop those young players, to make them play collectively and as a team, they could count on me. And that’s how it was,” he reported.
The coach states that “kids with quality exist, that’s undeniable”, highlighting young Ali Bashirov, 16 years old, from Qarabag, who “is perfectly at the level of the best players of 2010 from Portugal and the rest of the world”.
“Now, as they are not subject to good development contexts, it is natural that they will not be able to develop to those levels that we consider exceptional, that our young people reach. (…) Let’s see the development of these players. How it can be done and to what extent they can evolve”, he said.
Throughout his career, Rui Jorge only managed two matches of a senior team, for Belenenses, in the last two matches of the 2008/09 season, against his will and only after a phone call from Jaime Pacheco, who left the ‘blues’ at that time, continuing only to coach youth teams.
“It was never my goal (coaching seniors), it was never my desire. Sometimes I understand that for people it is difficult to understand that there is someone who is content or very satisfied or fulfilled by training at a level that is not the one that everyone idealizes as the maximum level. But I can no longer explain why I do it. I have said it many times that it is a life that does not seduce me”, he admitted.
Rui Jorge thinks that we should “rethink what football is and the position of the football coach in what are the main teams nowadays”, questioning whether “a I League coach can be called a profession at this time, because three months later he is out, because he doesn’t get a result or draw a game”.
“It’s not the life I want for myself and therefore it was never my ambition, nor did I think about it”, said the coach, who revealed that there were many invitations, but that only one was made public, made by the president of Sporting, Frederico Varandas.
The former Portuguese international says that, even for that reason, he never thought about moving up a step in the Portuguese Football Federation and becoming main coach, assuming that it was never “much to change”.
“I was at Belenenses for four or five years. I was in the national team all these years. As a player, it was roughly the same thing, for many years at the clubs I was at. So, it’s my way of being. When I like being in a place, I do everything to preserve that place and to give everything I have, and it has usually been something that is reciprocated by the other side”, he concluded.
