Things started with a fight and haven’t gotten much better since. Over the past five months or so, arrests have increased; allegations of drug trafficking and money laundering; dark whispers of illegal data breaches; vague accusations of bullying; and several charged invectives about financial irregularities, dishonesty and betrayal.
This year, around the world, at least 64 countries will hold elections. The same will be true for the European Union. The campaigns will be fierce. Often they can be toxic. Few, however, will prove as virulent – or offer as instructive a case study on the state of democracy in 2024 – as the one who decides who will be president of FC Porto.
Like dozens of clubs in Europe, Porto – one of the three great houses of Portuguese football – is owned by its members. Their numbers currently stand around 140,000. Every few years the club holds an election, both for a president and a board of directors, to determine who should run the club on their behalf.
Usually this amounts to little more than paperwork. Only a small percentage of members vote. The choice is usually between two essentially indistinguishable old men, when there is a choice. Until the last round of elections in 2020, Porto was only a democracy in the most symbolic sense of the term.
Since 1982, Jorge Nuno Pinto da Costa has been president of Porto. During that period, he saw the team crowned European champions twice – 1987 and 2004, quiz fans – and established them as Portugal’s preeminent force. Porto won 23 Portuguese titles under Pinto da Costa, nine more than Benfica, their closest rival at the time.
There was generally little appetite for change then. Often, club elections were likely to attract the attention of a strongman somewhere in the former Soviet bloc. Pinto da Costa was largely re-elected unopposed, the votes little more than a box-ticking exercise, a parade of bureaucracy, with all the excitement that entails.
This year has been quite different. Some 35,000 members are expected to vote on Saturday, a much higher turnout than usual. They will be asked to choose one of the three presidential candidates listed on the ballot.
There is Pinto da Costa, now 82, and Nuno Lobo, a 54-year-old businessman and defeated challenger in 2020. But what attracts the most attention is André Villas-Boas , still childish at 46, revered not only as the young upstart who coached Chelsea and Tottenham, but also as the manager who led Porto themselves to a hat-trick in 2011. He was appointed, at only 31 years old, under the aegis of Pinto da Costa.
Villas-Boas announced his candidacy – as a life member, he said, he had always dreamed of being club president – during a lavish presentation in November attended by a phalanx of alumni Porto players.
He then tries to adopt a diplomatic approach to the one who gave him his chance. The message was – admittedly partly out of political expediency – that, despite all the gratitude owed to Pinto da Costa, it was time for change. (Villas-Boas was less kind to the manager under whom he made his name: in a moving montage of Porto’s greatest triumphs, José Mourinho was conspicuous by his absence.)
However, by challenging a powerful historical operator, Villas-Boas quickly found it increasingly difficult to maintain this particular line. At the club’s general assembly in November, members of the Super Dragões, Porto’s largest ultra faction, were would have attacked those who spoke out against the club’s management. A dozen people were subsequently arrested, including the group’s leader, Fernando Madureira. A police raid on his home then discovered drugs, weapons and several thousand euros in cash. (Madureira remains in prison, awaiting trial.)
That set the tone. All three candidates have spent the past few months touring various locations around the city, visiting with supporter groups and canvassing schools, as any self-respecting presidential candidate would do. The rhetoric has become more and more spleen. “Almost every day it’s like laundry, washing dirty clothes,” Lobo said.
Pinto da Costa, visibly stung by what he perceives as a betrayal of a former protégé, at one point compared Villas-Boas to his dog. He accused Villas-Boas of surrounding himself with “enemies of FC Porto”, suggesting that he is just a lackey of the others. He highlighted Villas-Boas’s upper-middle-class lineage, portraying him as an elitist snob, and suggested his campaign had illegally obtained the phone numbers of voting members.
Villas-Boas, on the other hand, has spared no effort in the face of what he considers to be poor management of the club by Pinto da Costa. Porto’s latest financial figures show debts and liabilities of more than $700 million, evidence of what it called its “dysfunctional structure”. The club, he said, is essentially “operationally bankrupt.”
Pinto da Costa, he claims, allowed Porto, once a model for how clubs could navigate the transfer market, to be used as a “trading warehouse”, controlling his trading strategy. transfer being essentially ceded to a handful of privileged agents. “The authority of the club has dissipated in favor of the interests of certain intermediaries,” Villas-Boas said.
He called for guarantees on the transparency of the elections and described the November violence – which led to accusations that the ultras were protecting what they see as a beneficial relationship with the club’s current leaders – as one of “the darkest days in the history of Porto”. All this, says Villas-Boas, proves the urgency of reform.
It’s unclear how Saturday’s elections will play out: the expected record turnout bodes well for Villas-Boas, but football teams are inherently conservative places, wary of drastic change and quick to grasp for comfort. of the familiar. Porto has been the stronghold of Pinto da Costa for four decades; fans, members, may have difficulty envisioning a world in which this would not be the case.
What’s more obvious, and more disheartening, is that it’s not particularly difficult to draw a line between it all – the accusations and allegations, the easy-to-reach conspiracies, the bitter threat of actual violence – and what may happen instead are more important electoral milestones in the coming months. This, it seems, is how democracy works in 2024, whether it is the future of a club or a country.
Big step, bigger shoes
It’s hard to argue that Arne Slot doesn’t deserve his chance. In his three seasons at Feyenoord, he won only the club’s second championship of the century, won a Dutch Cup and guided the team to their first European final since 2002. And he did all this with a team reconstituted on a much tighter budget than those of its national rivals.
That he has become the favorite to replace Jürgen Klopp at Liverpool is therefore no surprise. (At the time of writing, the coach and club were discussing compensation; the momentum seems likely to end in a meeting.)
Liverpool had promised a data-driven forensic approach to searching for Klopp’s replacement. Slot ticks most of the boxes. Liverpool are betting perhaps that the most gaping hole in their CV – experience in managing the caliber of player they would find at Anfield – is down to a lack of opportunity rather than ability.
Slot’s biggest challenge, however, wouldn’t be the team. It will be the fans. The fact that Slot seemed, to many, to be a disappointing choice is not due to him but rather to the man he would be tasked with replacing: Klopp, who has not only won almost every trophy at his disposal in during his nine years at Liverpool. , but also established an iron bond with the crowd and a large part of the city.
If hired and given time, Slot might be able to replicate that, and maybe even surpass it. But it is unlikely that there will be enough time. The big challenge for Slot – as it would have been for whoever replaced Klopp – would be what would happen if Liverpool, a few months into next season, found themselves eighth in the Premier League, already struggling to keep up with the pace. The slot machine is a rational and logical choice. The test, after Klopp, is moving.
David versus Goliath. But also Goliath against David.
There’s no doubt that Chelsea’s Women’s Champions League semi-final first leg win over Barcelona last week was a surprise: the Barcelona Femení, after all, hadn’t lost at all since a year, had not lost at home since before the pandemic and were the big favorites to be crowned European champions again.
Yet the idea of Emma Hayes’ Chelsea team as some sort of Mighty Ducks-style underdog doesn’t really match reality. After all, Chelsea have broken the world transfer record at least twice, employ several of the world’s highest-paid players and have won each of the last four editions of the Women’s Super League, Europe’s richest women’s tournament.
Barcelona, of course, are under pressure to overcome their one-goal deficit and reach a fifth Champions League final in six years when the teams meet in the second leg in London on Saturday. But Chelsea also have certain expectations. The fact that he has yet to win a European title is something of an omission in Hayes’ otherwise impeccable CV. She certainly won’t want to leave England without remedying this situation.
