“All four of my parents and my best friend’s parents died on the same day, in a car accident. Whoever goes through this, the rest is relativized”

“A happy, good-natured and friendly kid.” Rui Vitória was born and raised in Alverca, in 1970. His mother was a secretary at OGMA, a maintenance and material manufacturing company for aircraft, his father was a welder at TAP.

There were no difficulties, but the family was “humble”. The parents worked “from morning to night” to support their two children and saved for their long-awaited vacation in the Algarve.

The trip to Monte Gordo was “tremendous happiness”. They left Alverca at dawn, with the car loaded – “even the pans were gone!”, he recalls. They slept at the campsite and the father made the same trip two months earlier to reserve space for the tents.

As a child, I would go out in the morning to play football with my friends, come back for lunch and go out again until dinner time. “When it was time to go eat, my father would whistle to go home,” she remembers.

Sport and football were always present. He graduated in Physical Education at the Faculty of Human Motricity, during the course he played football and with the 25 contos he earned he helped his parents pay the expenses. At the age of 19, he started teaching at Alverca Secondary School, where he studied. At night he took a coaching course and played senior football.

“I never imagined having the life I have today.” The mother was always very skeptical about her son’s future – “She asked me a lot: ‘What will happen to your life?’”, she confesses. For her family and the land where she lived, “horizons were always very short.”

Everything changed when he received two calls on a Sunday night. He had two invitations to be a coach at two clubs. It was the click to stop being a player. The next day he packed his bags, moved house and introduced himself as coach of Vilafranquense. These were complicated times, there were late salaries and “problem solving was daily”. It was at this time that Benfica appeared, moved to Seixal and started training the juniors.

It took two years to train, but I knew the goal was to reach professional football. He was at Fátima four seasons and continued teaching in Alverca. He left teaching when he made the jump to Paços de Ferreira, which later opened the door for Luís Filipe Vieira to invite him to coach Benfica.

“There was speculation that he could be one of the chosen ones, but I thought that was not the step that Benfica wanted to take”, he says.

He joined Benfica at a delicate moment. Jorge Jesus had left for Sporting, the first six months were difficult. “The boat was heavy and no one believed me.”

It was as coach of Al Nassar, in Saudi, that he followed the case involving the former president of Benfica. The good relationship between them is public and he confesses that it was not “easy” to see “a person we like being exposed” in that way.

Coach Rui Vitória is a guest on the new episode of Geração 70.

In this conversation with Bernardo Ferrão we get to know the other side of the job. We talk about his childhood, adolescence, career, the evolution of football, media pressure – from fans, cheerleaders, club presidents – and even what he thinks about today’s players: “The locker room has become more difficult for a coach . Your word has less impact on the player. After a game, they don’t try to find out if the performance was good or bad, they arrive in the locker room and hold on to their cell phones”, he concludes.

Now he is without a club, after a short spell with the Egyptian national team. He doesn’t close the door on one day being a National Team Coach, but for now he rules it out. “The team is doing very well,” he says.

This interview was recorded before the election of André Villas Boas as president of FC Porto.

Geração 70 is not a podcast about politics or economics, nor about arts or science. It’s a loose conversation with today’s protagonists who were born in the 70s. The generation that is in charge of the country or on the way. Here we talk about expectations and frustrations. Of dreams come true and those that were lost. A first-person portrait of the indelible passage of time, a journey from the 70s to the present day led by Bernardo Ferrão