Diogo Matos interview at TRIBUNA EXPRESSO – March, 2020 “We were in one of those training sessions where we would run like crazy, and Bölöni says to Barbosa: “Pedro, isso tá lento” (“Pedro, you’re so slow”). He replies: “‘Sim, László, talento!” (“Yes, László, talent!”) Diogo Matos won the championship with Sporting, but he retired from football at age 28, due to injuries. He ended up having a more active career off the field than on it, although his work is based precisely on combining what happens on the pitch with what happens in the offices, as explained in an interview with Tribuna Expresso. He brought management and training together, led the Sporting Academy, started to work with the Portuguese Football Federation in the process of certifying training clubs and is now a FIFA high performance expert - a position that he alternates with golf, which he started to play with former colleague, Phil Babb. Are we next to a golf course because in the meantime youve switched from football to golf? [laughs] No. I live close by, so it’s convenient for me. But I like golf a lot and I'm also helping the Federation to increase the quality of what’s on offer. Do you like it more than football? No, no. But I like it a lot. I think they are perfectly complementary, both in terms of physical and mental activity. It is a need that is being created and that is increasing more and more, because it is a very challenging sport, and I like challenges. How did you start playing? I started playing golf while playing for Sporting. Phil Babb lived here in Cascais and we would often go to training together. He started daring me to try it out, because he played. That's when I started. I played with him and [Peter] Schmeichel also came here to play from time to time - he was no longer a Sporting player but he came here to play golf. That's when I started to like it. In England, footballers play a lot of golf. Did Phil Babb play well? Yes, yes, he did. He had a single digit handicap, as they say [laughs]. I think it 1 was seven or eight. I haven't gotten there yet, but I'm already at 10 - and I've already had a nine - which isn’t bad. But now with less time to practice... It’s a sport that requires practice. Do you miss football? Very much. How can I explain... I miss the game. Playing the game, being in an arena where we all have the same rules, where we all want to do better and compete. With every move we have something to prove to ourselves and I like that. I feel nostalgic about that aspect. As for the rest, from my point of view, what the football industry is - I don't miss it, because today I'm much more active off the pitch than I was before. But in terms of the game itself, I miss the adrenaline before the game. And the dressing rooms? The dressing rooms too, obviously, but those who have been footballers know that we never lose those dressing room habits, so much so that, even with our group of friends, we do everything to make it almost like a dressing room [laughs]. Do you still play for fun? Unfortunately, not anymore. I still played a little, I mean, more or less, but I had a lot of knee injuries. That's also what led me to end my career early. At 28 years old. Exactly. There were a lot of knee injuries. The last, more serious one was while playing for Sporting, on tour in the USA. I was operated on, but it was a very serious situation, I never played again after that. I made a clear decision to bring forward what was about to happen. I still had another year to go on my contract with Sporting and I was finishing my management course at ISEG too, so I made that decision. Did you manage to balance the course with your career? I managed to, but it was hard. I started university as a high performance athlete, at the age of 17. I made my journey through the youth teams and I never failed at school, and for that I have to thank my parents, because I complained a lot, but they never let me quit school: “You will keep doing both while you can”. And I was always doing both, until the day I signed a professional contract with Sporting, when I was 17 years old. Then yes, being a professional, it was the priority. I never gave up on the course, but I slowed down a lot. It took me many years to finish it, but I finished it. I said I wasn't going to get myself into another one, but then I went to FMH [Faculty 2 of Human Kinetics] to get a master's degree in sports coaching [laughs]. The idea was to finish off my CV. I was a football player at all levels and I have a master's degree in sports training. I already had some idea of the practical side, and now I have a more scientific outlook on the world of football, because we always have to discover new things in order to stand out. On the management side of things, after finishing the course at ISEG, I was a sports manager at the Sporting Academy, starting in 2005 for eight years, and I have had my company [Youth Football Management] for five or six years. Are you more interested in what happens on the pitch or in management? Or both? Somewhere in the middle. My job is to connect what is done on the pitch with what is done off the pitch. If a football manager doesn’t know the game, it’s unlikely that they’ll do a good job. Well, nowadays we are a little confused, because sometimes when we look at the people making decisions in the world of football, we see that they don’t have much experience of the game. Or people who comment on it, people who are experts in their own fields, be it law or surgery or whatever. But football is very specific and people don't realise that. Just because it appears in all the newspapers, there are three sports newspapers and it’s constantly on television, doesn’t mean that everyone understands the game. There needs to be a clear separation from being a fan... And I must say that I miss being a fan sometimes. I miss the healthy ignorance of going to see a game. When I watch a game now I am seeing a lot of things and I liked it much more in the past. When I went to the stadium as a child, I saw only magic. I left there and just imagined the grass, the ball bouncing, and I would barely sleep at night. Nowadays, I’ve lost that. But this means to say that there are those who should stick to being a fan and enjoy that healthy ignorance, instead of trying to interfere. Because then, with all this social pressure and these means of communication, it kind of affects the decision about who is a professional in the area, who has a career. I am 44 years old and I have spent 35 years in football, as a player and as a manager, working for many different institutions. I think that makes me and other people with similar careers more qualified to talk about and manage football. But anyway, today, that’s the reality. Do you watch any programmes where people talk about football? I don't watch any of those programmes. I think it's counterproductive. Nor 3 is there much reality there, there are only messages. Actually, the only programme that I used to follow, because they spoke in a different way, was Maisfutebol. That one, yes. What is it like being a FIFA high performance expert? It is kind of the outcome of everything I have done during my career. From FIFA’s standpoint, it has to do with the 2026 World Cup, which will have 48 teams. Looking at the world rankings, we are starting to see some names that may be at the World Cup that have never been there before. This led FIFA officials to think: "If we are going to have France, Brazil, Argentina playing against these teams, then we’re going to have scores like 6-0, 5-0 and it will ruin the show. It will remove the unpredictability of the result". FIFA doesn’t want fans to lose interest in watching the games, so they have to help prevent that from happening. So, to answer the question, I am involved in this process, because a high performance expert is someone who connects what is on the field and what is off the field to help the lower- ranked federations to improve their performance, both in the first team and in the youth teams and in women’s football. How many experts are there? There are about 12 or 13 high performance experts and we will be allocated across more than 120 member associations, as they call it, federations that belong to FIFA. They receive a questionnaire and then we go to visit them, to identify areas for improvement. Then we return to FIFA and design a programme for that association, so that it can improve its performance in the medium term.