Thread from The Times article on Joao Sacramento. I am coping and pasting whole article so you don't have to sign up on The Times to read the article:

From superfan to Mourinho’s No 2: the making of João Sacramento, José Mourinho’s right-hand man at Tottenham Hotspur.

When João Sacramento was invited to an audience with José Mourinho this year he thought it was simply a favour from a colleague. Luis Campos, Mourinho’s close friend and the sporting director at Lille, where Sacramento was then assistant coach, had set up the meeting.

Sacramento knew Campos was aware of his lifelong admiration for Mourinho. What he didn’t know was that this, in reality, was a job interview. Success would mean him becoming Mourinho’s right-hand man.

Yet this was not their first contact. In 2009, when Sacramento was in his first year of a football coaching degree at the now-defunct University of Glamorgan in south Wales, the then 19-year-old sent a report he had written on Mourinho’s work to the manager, who was at Inter.

“João had done a piece of work on Mourinho’s methodologies and his philosophies,” Steve Savage, the head of sport at University of South Wales, said. “Dave [Adams, then senior lecturer] looked at it and said the work was fantastic and told him to send it to Mourinho.”

Mourinho responded. “He said it was a great piece of work and to keep doing what you’re doing,” Savage recalled. This was an immediate boost to the teenager, who told Savage he would be coaching in the Champions League in ten years’ time.

To be doing that now, and alongside Mourinho at Tottenham Hotspur, makes it all the more special.

As well as Sacramento’s tactical nous, his determination will have stood out to Mourinho. To pursue a career in coaching, Sacramento had moved to Wales from his native Portugal in 2008, against the wishes of his parents. His mother and father had wanted their son to go into

a traditional industry, to become an engineer, perhaps, or a lawyer. Sacramento was a straight-A student in Braga and the course at Glamorgan required only a B and C at A level. “João was very quiet when we first met him,” Savage said. “He came over with his mum and dad to look

at the course. They were wary and sceptical of this move into football and very worried.”

Savage and Adams persuaded them it was right for Sacramento. They said he would be able to work with the Welsh FA and Cardiff City, who were based on the same campus. Sacramento took full use of the opportunity. On top of his weekly studies, he did an internship of 30 hours

a week with the FAW, producing reports for Gary Speed, the Wales manager at the time, on opposition teams, and spent his spare time with Cardiff. Sacramento had arrived speaking very little English but was fluent after six months.

“He very quickly got settled in and his desire to learn was frightening,” Savage said. “He immersed himself into everything, in the classroom, extra-curricular stuff, playing football with us, getting involved in local coaching and partnerships with the university.

He was very much 24/7 football.”

Sacramento played as well. He was a midfielder in Portugal and represented the university. “Typical Portuguese flair,” Savage said. “Not technical or talented enough for the British game.”

Adams and Sacramento were close. The lecturer became “like a father figure” to him while away from home. “João came with a different mindset to the average student,” Adams said. “Most want to spend a couple of years enjoying themselves and having that social life but João wasn’t

interested in that. He was dedicated to observing, watching and reflecting on the way people worked, and formulating his own ideas.”

Sacramento went on to do his masters at the university after earning a first-class honours degree. Adams arranged a further internship with the FAW but was concerned about how he could break into such a competitive industry. It was on one of Sacramento’s trips back to Braga, in

2013, that he had a chance meeting that changed his life.

Sacramento was sitting in an airport café writing up a report. A man sat down nearby and noticed him working. They got talking and the man explained that he was about to become sporting director at Monaco and liked João’s work. His name was Luis Campos.

Sacramento sent Campos more reports and, about a month later, Campos offered him a job as an opposition analyst at Monaco under Leonardo Jardim. After six months of working with Jardim, Sacramento was promoted to assistant coach, but he left for Lille in 2017 after Campos moved

to the club. What Campos liked about Sacramento — and what made him a perfect partner for Mourinho — was his footballing education. He had been schooled in the same philosophy as Mourinho, which comes from the Portuguese academic Vitor Frade.

Frade’s theory is called tactical periodisation. Nuno Espírito Santo, Carlos Carvalhal, Marco Silva and André Villas-Boas are all students of tactical periodisation. Pep Guardiola and Mauricio Pochettino use similar approaches. It is an ideology based on the use of the ball in

every aspect of training and translated into a match. John Terry once recalled how Mourinho explained it to the Chelsea team of 2004: “He told us that you never see a pianist running around a piano, you see a pianist work on the piano.”

This provided an instant link between Mourinho and Sacramento. “It was like a marriage made in heaven,” Adams said.

For one of his students to be working alongside Mourinho at Tottenham is a dream for Savage, who is a Spurs fan. Savage can already see his influence. A conversation between Mourinho and Sacramento early on in their Champions League home game against Olympiacos last month led to

Eric Dier being taken off after 29 minutes and replaced by Christian Eriksen, with the side 2-0 down. Spurs won 4-2.

“He will challenge Mourinho,” Savage said. “Throughout a game he will tell Mourinho how he feels. He will be forthright but he’ll do it in the right way.”