Ruben Amorim finally arrived at Manchester United on Monday, and he is not the only new face at Old Trafford.
Amorim’s backroom staff is yet to be fully confirmed, but one man who it has been confirmed will be joining Amorim at United is former Liverpool first-team physio Paulo Barreira. He is United’s new lead sport scientist, and as well as previously working for Liverpool, Barreira also held a position as a first-team physio at Arsenal.
Barreira was Liverpool’s first-team physio between 2011 and 2014, and was Arsenal’s first-team physio between 2017 and 2020, before linking up with Amorim at Sporting, where he has spent the last four years of his career.
Speaking in 2019 about a physio’s role at a soccer club, Barreira said: “The physio is the bridge for the coach, who takes the information we are providing them with to decide on the management of the players.
“This way, we can help ensure that the players are in a suitable physical shape for the coach’s game model. We monitor their work on the pitch by using a GPS tracking advice a lot, we ask players a lot of questions daily to understand if they are ready to train, if they feel well and if they slept well.
“This information is then passed on to the technical team where they can deal with player management and contribute to having the team better physically adapted to what they want to do. That also helps to prevent an injury and reduce its frequency.”
Barreira studied for his PhD at Liverpool John Moores University, where he worked alongside Dr Mark Robinson, a reader in biomechanics. Robinson recalled the world Barreira did at Liverpool: “Paulo was a physio at Liverpool FC and worked with us at LJMU to rehabilitate some of their high profile players including Lucas Leiva who had a long term injury at the time. We predominately did isokinetic evaluations for them, which is essentially muscle strength assessment.
“He was always a very hard worker and fiercely determined to get his PhD despite having a very full on job over in Anfield. He was also embracing new approaches to both athlete monitoring and rehabilitation. Paulo continues to produce high quality research. One of his PhD papers on load monitoring in football has an impressive 118 citations.”
