There will be a different sound emanating from the training pitches at Carrington today as Ruben Amorim and his staff take charge of a session for the first time.
Amorim started work as United’s head coach a week ago and he has bought five members of his backroom staff with him from Sporting. Only Adelio Candido is still waiting for a visa, with the rest likely to be running training for the first time today.
Only United’s non-internationals will be in at Carrington and there will still be some familiar voices, with first-team coaches Andreas Georgson and Darren Fletcher staying on, as is assistant goalkeeping coach Craig Mawson.
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These are the five members of staff Amorim has bought with him to United
Carlos Fernandes
At 29 Fernandes might seem young to be the assistant head coach at United, but then he has been Amorim’s right-hand man since he started out with him at Casa Pia at the age of 23.
While Amorim has a distinguished playing career behind him, Fernandes never played at professional level and quickly turned his attentions to coaching, doing the same degree in high-performance coaching at the University of Lisbon that Amorim did. Fernandes remains Amorim’s assistant, but could have aspirations of a head coach job one day and Amorim has high hopes for him.
“My No 2 is Carlos Fernandes, he’s been my right-hand man right from day one. He’ll be a much better coach than me,” Amorim once said. “I often say if I become Bobby Robson, then he’ll be my Jose Mourinho!”
Emanuel Ferro
Ferro, 45, joined United after almost a decade at Sporting and he was at the club at the same time as Bruno Fernandes, who he will link up with again now. Ferro worked with the youth teams at Benfica between 2006 and 2009, which is where he first came across Amorim, who was playing for the first-team at the time.
He also studied for a high-performance masters’ degree at the University of Lisbon between 2003 and 2005, having initially done a degree in sports science at the same institute. As the most experienced member of the backroom team, Ferro has previously conducted some media engagements at Sporting for Amorim.
Adelio Candido
Candido is still waiting for his visa to be approved, but at 28 the first-team coach is even younger than Fernandes and could become something of a link-man between the players and the coaching team.
Candido has followed Amorim from Casa Pia to Braga to Sporting and now Old Trafford. His coaching career began at 18, when he became assistant coach to the Under-15s at Beira Mar. He studied for a sports degree at Lusofana University in Lisbon between 2014 and 2017.
Speaking on the Pro Desporto podcast, he said of Amorim: “It must be hard to find a coach who’s so easy to work with. Because he’s a great friend and a very close person. We’ve been very close since we met. Things ended up developing very quickly and we already know each other well.
“He’s different, because in human terms, coaches try to be tougher, and Rúben isn’t like that. He’s a good person, he gets along with us, our day-to-day life is very happy, the dynamics are very good and we do our work the same way. We live as a family and spend most of our days ‘joking around’. If someone filmed that office, no one would believe it.”
Jorge Vital
Vital replaces Jelle ten Rouwelaar at United and will lead the first-team goalkeeping environment, with support from assistant Mawson, who remains at the club. At 63 Vital is considerably older than the rest of Amorim’s staff, but he has been a goalkeeping coach for more than two decades, working at Sporting first in 2011/12, before returning to the club in August 2020.
Vital spent 16 years across two spells at Braga and was at the club when Amorim arrived from Casa Pia as head coach. Vital is considered an expert in helping goalkeepers improve with their feet and could employ similar methods to Ten Rouwelaar, who was popular with United’s goalkeepers.
Paulo Barreira
Barreira is on familiar ground in the UK. The sports scientist is a former PhD student at John Moores University in Liverpool and has also worked at Liverpool and Arsenal.
Dr Mark Robinson, a reader in biomechanics in the LJMU Research Institute for Sport and Exercise Science, worked with Paulo on football injury evaluations.
“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,” Robinson said. “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.”
He returned to Portugal to link up with Amorim at Sporting in 2020.
