Vitor Pereira interview: Wolves’ transformation, pub trips and the personal toll of management

Vitor Pereira is sitting in a pub, reflecting on his success at Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Where else for the man who has made buying into local culture a key part of his remarkable turnaround at Molineux?

“What do we do in Wolverhampton after a game?” asks Pereira, who has been photographed and videoed in a variety of pubs around the city since his appointment in December.

“If I lose the game, I stay home and drink my beer alone. If I win the game, I go with the supporters to celebrate. I think the connection with the people is stronger when we suffer together and when you are in a situation where you are fighting for survival, you feel this connection.

“In the moments that we are suffering, you feel that we are suffering together. In the moments of celebration, you need to be with them. You need to be with the people because you need to see the smiles. This is my energy.”

Pereira looks at home in a countryside pub six miles east of Wolverhampton as he holds court to a group of journalists on coaching, Wolves, teaching and his journey to the Premier League, which began almost 57 years ago in the small, coastal town of Espinho, near Oporto, where he lived with his family in a basement apartment that flooded with sea water most winters.

“I’m a man of the sea,” says Pereira. “I grew up on the beach. My house was 50 metres from the beach. At the time, my father didn’t have money so we lived in a ‘cave’ underground.

“Every winter, for three months, there was water inside. I felt ashamed because my clothes smelled and I felt wet all the time, but that was our life.

“I had very happy teenage years because, in this kind of community, we had confident guys together.

“It was a very humble village with fishermen. We grew up on the street, fighting together, fighting for space, competing every time, competing and fighting, competing and fighting, competing and fighting. This is what I have inside of me. This is the power.”

Pereira is a long way from his humble beginnings, coaching in one of the world’s elite football leagues and adored by Wolves supporters just five months after he arrived as a virtual unknown.

His route to the Premier League passed through Saudi Arabia (twice), Greece, Turkey (twice), Germany, China and Brazil as well as his native Portugal, where he set his sights on the Premier League even while working as a sports teacher. He also had a spell as a part-time lifeguard while playing football at what he concedes was a low level.

“When I played, I was a coach inside the pitch,” Pereira smiles. “I was always shouting, ‘Do this and do that’, but when the ball came to my foot, the mind said one thing but the foot said no.

“I realised that, but I had a career. It was in the third division in Portugal but I got the money to do my coaching course, to go to the university, to buy my car, to buy my clothes. Since I was 16 years old, I never asked for one euro from my parents.

“I did small jobs to get money to go to discos and on Saturdays, in the morning, I was a lifeguard on the beach. They paid me a lot of money, I had the sun and I saved people.”

For the reporters present, the segway is irresistible: from saving lives to saving Wolves.

But how did Pereira do it with a group of players in the bottom three when he succeeded Gary O’Neil, with relegation looking highly likely and with a dressing room on the brink of implosion following multiple incidents of ill-discipline?

”It’s my personality,” he says. “I’m a confident guy, believe me. I’m confident because I built my life by working hard. I spent a long time building to have clear ideas about football. I committed a lot of mistakes in my career and these mistakes give me the opportunity to be stronger now.

”I made mistakes with the superstars, in how to manage the big names, the big egos, but I learned how to give confidence in the middle of a season, and to make an impact on the first day.

“I used to say that if I go to the pitch for one training session, you will see the difference. You know why? Because I have confidence in myself. I have confidence in my staff. Nobody can work without confidence.”

Wolves were on course for relegation when Vitor Pereira was appointed but he has transformed their fortunes (Matt McNulty/Getty Images)

Pereira arrived at a club 19th in the Premier League, five points adrift of safety with nine points from 16 games.

They secured survival with five matches remaining and now sit on 41 points from 34 games, and in a league table based just on results since Pereira arrived, they sit seventh with 32 from 18.

Not bad for a coach who was made to wait for his big chance in the Premier League.

In the course of an hour-long chat, Pereira says his first meeting with a Premier League club came more than a decade ago, not far away — with Wolves’ fierce rivals West Bromwich Albion.

Since then, he says, he has spoken three times to Everton as well as Chelsea, Crystal Palace and Arsenal, all of whom ultimately chose other options, while Pereira reveals the one job he turned down in England was at Watford, shortly after one of their relegations from the top flight.

Having made the Premier League his Holy Grail after winning back-to-back titles with Porto in 2012 and 2013, Pereira instead became a footballing globetrotter.

Porto players lift Pereira after winning the Portuguese league in 2013 (Miguel Riopa/AFP via Getty Images)

Now, though, there is a feeling that his arrival in his dream coaching destination might just have been perfectly timed and that the multiple previous frustrations happened for a reason.

“Maybe I was not ready before and God took care of me, and now is the time,” he says.

“It’s not when you want it, but now is the time and this is the club. I stayed for three years in China, I went to Saudi twice, twice to Fenerbahce.

“But tactically, to express myself and feel I’m in the place I wanted to be all my life, I never felt this (until now).

“I worked elsewhere and I was very happy. We won and lost titles and had a lot of experiences. Brazil and Turkey are very difficult and Greece is not easy because the emotion is high.

“But it all gave us the background and the experience to come here.”

Has Pereira enjoyed himself so far? “A lot,” he says. “Sometimes when I’m in the game, it’s like I’m playing PlayStation.

“We can have a full stadium, but my focus is to anticipate the next moment of the game. It means if the ball is over there, I’m looking over here. You are always one second ahead, trying to anticipate what will happen.”

There is a shadow, however, hanging over Pereira’s success. For the past decade or more, he has spent much of his life away from his wife and three sons, now aged 28, 26 and 24.

Early in his coaching career, he and his family decided that following him around the world was not conducive to a happy childhood.

So they remain in Portugal while he plies his trade abroad. He sees them during breaks in the season and will spend much of his summer working from Espinho, sitting, he says, overlooking the sea with a beer and a notebook, still formulating plans for next season.

But there is no avoiding the fact that he has become a partially absent father and husband.

“This is the part of my life that is difficult to speak about,” he admits. “For the last 15 years, my wife was the father and the mother because I didn’t see anything — birthdays, when they graduate… I have never been there. Never.

“These are sacrifices you have to make but I don’t want my sons in football. I don’t want this life for my sons because they cannot have a family life in this job. It’s impossible.

“We have a lot of moments where we suffer a lot. And we do it alone.

“But for me, competition is like a drug, a passion and a drug. I cannot live without it. Because after one month (out of work), I start to be nervous. I cannot enjoy anything.

“In the past, I said to my wife, ‘This is the opportunity that I have’. I was a teacher for 15 years and I told her this is the opportunity that I have to build a life for my sons.

“But later, when I had made a lot of money, she asked me, ‘Now what is it for? It’s for you. Since the beginning, it’s for you’.

(Dan Mullan/Getty Images)

“Sometimes I go home, and it’s like, ‘Where are my clothes?’ I don’t know where the knives and forks are.

“They start to talk when we have lunch or dinner, and my mind is on football. I’m thinking about the problem that I need to solve, and they are talking about things that I don’t understand.

”It’s like I started to watch a movie, and I lost the movie until the end. And I see the end, and I don’t know what happened.

“It’s like the personality of my sons has changed, and I didn’t realise. Believe me, if a manager says to you that he doesn’t suffer alone, he is lying. We must suffer to be stronger.

“And I believe that the moments of my life gave me the opportunity to be stronger. And I arrived here ready to fight.“

And with that, and following a sip of his lager, Pereira is back onto his obsession, onto coaching and onto Wolves, where he already feels like a natural fit after the early success of O’Neil’s reign fizzled out to leave his successor with a big rebuilding job.

It began in January, most notably with the signings of Emmanuel Agbadou and Marshall Munetsi, and will continue in the summer with several senior players expected to leave.

Pereira does not know, he insists, whether they will include attacking talisman Matheus Cunha. “We never have this kind of conversation,” he says.

But, he adds, he hopes to keep the majority of his current squad and supplement it with some clever signings.

And he is ready to insist on a big say in who comes and who goes.

“I must be involved,” he says. “We cannot have a player if I don’t select him. How do I know he can play my game?

“It’s nothing special. I must be connected with the people in the club and together we will find the right solutions. We will start to look for players — we have the first option, second option, third option, fourth option and one of them must come.

“If someone comes that we don’t know, we won’t know if they can play in our way and these are the mistakes we can’t make. We can’t waste money because we don’t have a lot of money.”

So while Wolves get to work in the summer transfer window, their head coach will be directing from afar, looking out to sea, drinking his beer and drawing pictures of the team he wants to build — the manifestation of a creative personality that he says football has allowed him to express.

”If I was not a manager, I would be something like an architect,” he says. “I like to create things. Creating a style of game in the team is like taking a baby in my arms and starting to help him to grow.

“It’s like I start a new painting, and I need to create. I plan the training sessions, and I need to create them every day because if I don’t do this, I start to be unbalanced.

“I’m not satisfied with what I’m doing now. I want more and more and more. This is football, it has given me the opportunity to express my creativity, a side of myself that I need to be.”

(Top image: WWFC/Wolves via Getty Images)

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