It’s this Saturday: Pinto da Costa faces opposition for the fourth time in 42 years – News

Pinto da Costa faces opposition for the fourth time in 42 years as president of FC Porto on Saturday, when he competes in the elections for national football runners-up with André Villas-Boas and Nuno Lobo, after 15 consecutive victories.

Américo de Sá’s successor since April 17, 1982, the 33rd maximum leader in the club’s history, aged 86, had 12 victories as a single candidate, defeated doctor José Martins Soares twice in succession, in 1988 and 1991, and supplanted jurist José Fernando Rio and businessman and professor Nuno Lobo in 2020, in a vote spread over two days.

Pinto da Costa prevailed four years ago with 5,247 of the votes (68.65%), against 2,071 for Rio (26.44%) and 384 for Lobo (4.91%), corresponding to the lowest percentage of the 15 successes obtained in his ‘reign’ to the most participated FC Porto elections in the 21st century.

Despite the health restrictions in force, due to the covid-19 pandemic, 8,480 members were in the Dragão Arena pavilion, a lower bar than the record set in 1988, when 10,731 signed the ‘blue and white’ president’s first triumph over Martins Soares.

Pinto da Costa’s only opponent at the polls for 38 years, the doctor did not receive more than 535 votes (5%) and was far from the 10,196 of the leader with the most titles and longevity in world football (95%), losing with a slightly smaller margin three years later.

The turnout ‘fell’ to just over half the current record in 1991 and Martins Soares gathered the preference of 1,164 members (18%), compared to the 4,614 votes (82%) totaled by Pinto da Costa, who, without opponents, was having several victories close to 100%.

If the official results of the majority of electoral events that took place in the 1980s and some in the 1990s are unknown, the news archive of the Lusa agency attests to this image of unanimity in 1994 (99.19%, with 1,470 of the 1,482 votes cast), 1998 (99.81%, with 2,072 of 2,076), 2001 (98.83%, with 1,016 of 1,028), 2004 (99.25%, with 1,060 of 1,068), 2007 (98.43%, with 3,769 of 3,829 ), 2010 (98%, in a ballot in which the ‘dragons’ did not indicate the number of voters) and 2013 (99.13%, with 1,258 out of 1,269).

The trend had been going on since 1982, when 4,573 members (91.02%) elected Pinto da Costa as Américo de Sá’s successor, with a total of 5,024 votes, a few days after banker Afonso Pinto de Magalhães, leader of FC Porto in 1967 in 1972, he withdrew his candidacy, maintaining only a list for the Superior Council, which would be defeated.

The ‘dragons’ were revitalized over the following four decades, as a result of winning 2,586 trophies in 21 sports – 68 of which in men’s senior football -, but recent years have reinforced criticism of the current sporting, economic and infrastructural management.

A sign of this were the 2016 elections, the last to be held in isolation, in which Pinto da Costa obtained 79%, for a total of 2,403 voters, with 21% of invalid ballots.

This result would drop by more than 10 percentage points four years later, under the effect of a tripartite context, which is repeated between 09:00 and 20:00 on Saturday, at Estádio do Dragão, in Porto, maintaining two protagonists and bringing together the main face of the opposition.

Winner of four trophies for the ‘blue and white’ football team in 2010/11, including championship and Europa League, former coach André Villas-Boas (list B) will compete for the club’s leadership for the first time and leads an unprecedented challenge to Pinto da Costa (A), who is supported by two of the three electoral opponents he faces until 2024.

José Fernando Rio publicly declared this position at the beginning of April and José Martins Soares is the seventh name indicated by the president of FC Porto for the Superior Council, an advisory body that already competed in 2020 as Nuno Lobo’s first choice (list C).