The Nuno you don’t see at Nottingham Forest: Handpan player, diver, horse lover, ‘maniac’, worm dancer

“He was brilliant at ‘the Worm’. We used to play the Mario song Let Me Love You. Nuno would blast the volume up: ‘Let me love you! Let me be the one to…!’ Everyone in the dressing room would start clapping. And then we’d get Nuno’s dance. He’d go from one wall to the other, then reverse all the way back across a rock-hard floor. Everyone used to crack up with laughter. Ahahaha! Nuno was the king of the Worm.”

Benni McCarthy, South Africa’s record all-time scorer, is reminiscing about his long-standing friendship with Nuno Espirito Santo and their lifelong bond as Champions League winners with Porto.

“What a lot of people don’t know is that Nuno was the dressing-room joker,” says McCarthy. “He used to clown about all the time. You’d never know when you see his interviews now. He always says the right things. He’s very calm, very collected. He makes sure he doesn’t give anything away or come across as arrogant. That’s the calculated Nuno. Then, in his outside life, he was… a maniac.

“I say that with all the love in the world because I couldn’t be prouder of anybody I have worked with, or played with, than Nuno. He was the ultimate gentleman, a team-mate you would go above and beyond for. And I’m so happy for him now because the job he has done at Nottingham Forest has been incredible.”

It is the final week of the Premier League season and Nuno has already guaranteed Forest’s first European qualification for 30 years. It is still possible they can reach the Champions League and, when the backdrop to this story is that they began the season being tipped for relegation, nobody should be surprised Nuno is getting so much attention.

“He could manage any team in the world,” his agent, Jorge Mendes, tells The Athletic. “He is a natural leader… a coach capable of turning normal teams into competitive teams.”

But who is the real Nuno? Even now, it is difficult sometimes to know if the sport, as a whole, really understands who he is, how he is wired and what makes him tick. Nuno doesn’t give a lot away in interviews. He always seems to remain slightly out of reach — mostly, because that is the way he prefers it.

And yet, there is also considerable evidence to make a case that the man who has carried Forest’s hopes this season is actually one of the more fascinating, multi-layered people in the business. The beach boy, the joker, the worm, the maniac — and that’s just a small part of the Nuno story.

In another era, Aitor Karanka would light a scented candle in the manager’s office at Forest’s training ground and de-stress by listening to Ibiza chillout classics.

Frank Clark, the last manager to take Forest into Europe, liked to strum a guitar as a member of the Lonnie Donegan fan club and devotee of Eric Clapton. And, going even further back, Brian Clough loved a bit of The Ink Spots and, in particular, Frank Sinatra. “He met me once, you know,” Clough once said of Sinatra, as one of his greatest ever quotes.

With Nuno, however, it is something a bit more unorthodox. Soon after replacing Steve Cooper in December 2023, Nuno set about trying to locate a music shop in Nottingham that could find him a percussion instrument known as a handpan.

The handpan produces soothing sounds when users tap or drum their fingers against its steel edges. It perches on the knee and looks like a huge metallic shell. And it has become quite common for people to hear these sounds emanating from Nuno’s office.

A street musician plays his handpan in Banja Luka (ELVIS BARUKCIC/AFP/Getty Images)

“Is that (handpan) what it’s called?” says Ryan Yates, the Forest captain. “I went for a chat with him and I just sat there while he was playing it for five, 10 minutes. It was incredible — like walking into a luxury spa or a five-star hotel. I thought I was going to fall asleep!”

What is clear is that Nuno Espirito Santo (his last two names, translated, mean ‘Holy Spirit’) understands the pressures that come from managing a Premier League club and, just as importantly, that someone in his position should never forget to appreciate life’s pleasures.

Nuno’s love of horses means he often visits his stables in Nottingham before his typical working day starts at Forest’s training ground. He has an apartment in the city and when it is time to unwind he likes to sit by the window and watch the River Trent flow by. He has grown fond of Nottingham, even though his family remained in Portugal when he accepted the job.

One thing, however, that this landlocked city cannot offer him are the rugged cliffs and secluded beaches where, as a young daredevil, he would think nothing about diving 40ft into the waves. And, to understand Nuno properly, it is important to realise that the sea means everything to him.

Nuno’s childhood home in Sao Tome and Principe, a tiny archipelagic nation just off the coast of west Africa, was tucked away on a sandy track where the locals used to go spear fishing for their dinners, coconuts grew in the trees and school pick-up (five or six cars, usually) was the equivalent of rush hour. Almost half the island of Principe was jungle and, living so close to the beach, the young Nuno never had to bother with shoes. He was seven when his family left for Portugal and, all these years later, those early experiences continue to shape his life.

These days, he has one property in Portugal and another on the island of Formentera, the smallest of Spain’s Balearic Islands, just a short hop from Ibiza.

Every time Nuno flies back, his routine is the same: to drop off his cases, head for the beach and go for a swim, no matter what time of day. But he also relishes the sea’s challenges and occasional dangers, too.

“A lot of the players were too afraid to hang out with Nuno outside football because he’d want to take you deep-sea diving and all sorts of other stuff,” says McCarthy. “A lot of them used to think, ‘Nuno is this crazy guy outside football’. We didn’t have the stomach for some of the stuff he did. His hobbies were brutal. But nature didn’t scare him, he was up for anything.”

The people who know Nuno best all tend to say the same thing: that there are different layers to his personality and that he can surprise people who have seen him only on television. He is a polyglot who speaks English, Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian (even a bit of Russian) and, when the mood takes him, he is capable of delivering long, impassioned homilies on football, life and the world in general. He just chooses not to, for the most part, when it comes to press conferences and the back-and-forth of questions he has heard a thousand times before.

On the one hand, there is Nuno the manager: a study of focus and intensity, bristling with the competitive instincts that leaves fires smouldering behind his eyes whenever his team has a bad result.

Yet friends talk about another Nuno — the soft-focus Nuno — who can be warm, charming and convivial and used to keep a video on his phone that showed him, while manager of Wolves, hitting an exploding golf ball, having fallen victim to a prank from one of his players.

Nobody should be mistaken: Nuno is very much The Boss. Control is a big thing to him and, if you challenge his authority, there is usually only one winner. On a whiteboard in his office at Wolves, he had “MY WAY” written in capital letters and, beside it, there was a player’s name that had been crossed out in marker pen. That player left the club a few months later.

There is, however, a fun and playful side to him that became apparent again after Forest’s 1-0 victory against Manchester City in March, when the manager was filmed waltzing in the dressing room with Willy Boly, one of Forest’s substitutes (though the other players did wonder whether Nuno might be unhappy the clip had found its way to social media).

At Porto, Nuno went by the nickname of Morango, the Portuguese word for strawberry (though nobody seems absolutely sure why) and bought a plot of land overlooking Santuario da Penha, a religious monument in Guimaraes, because he was so enchanted by the views from the city’s hilltops.

One problem: unbeknownst to him, it was a protected area and he was denied planning permission to build his dream home. An appeal failed, too. He accepts it was his own fault and, ultimately, one of life’s lessons.

Now, two decades on, he has plans to retire one day to his own beach paradise. And he seemed bemused by the applause from his players, on their mid-season break to Dubai, when he climbed to the top board of their swimming pool and expertly dived six metres into the water.

Where he came from, he explained, he was used to much higher. “I love to dive. I have loved it since I was a young man. I have made some mistakes going to high places where I should not go, making people concerned, but the moment I see something like that, I cannot resist.

“I grew up doing this. I would cross the road and the sea was there. I would throw rocks to see if the water was deep enough. I was a young, happy man. I did (get into trouble), I did (hurt myself). You do not want to see the scar I have on my leg. Then I became a goalkeeper… that is why I like to dive. Now you understand?”

Perhaps it is unfortunate for Nuno that the most viewed footage from his goalkeeping days goes back to the final of the 2010 Taca da Liga, the Portuguese League Cup, when he bent down to stop a softly struck shot and somehow let it through his grasp.

The scorer of this freakish goal, nine minutes in, was a 25-year-old Ruben Amorim, then a midfielder for Benfica and now the Manchester United manager. Benfica won 3-0 and Nuno, then 36, never played for Porto again. He announced his retirement from playing that summer.

Nuno was part of Portugal’s squad for Euro 2008, but never made an appearance and that feels typical of his career over long periods. He knows, in short, what it is like not to play. He was even dubbed ‘O Substituto’ because of an 18-year-career, in three different countries, producing just 199 appearances.

Don’t read too much into that, when other clips of the young Nuno — clean-shaven, full head of hair and, as such, not immediately recognisable — show him pulling off some spectacular saves.

“Everyone at Porto had huge respect for him because every time he had an opportunity to play he never looked like a second-choice goalkeeper,” says McCarthy. “Everyone used to think, ‘How can he go so many games without playing and then look so good?’ So he got respect for that, and also the fact he never used to complain about anything.

“He was a larger-than-life character. He was always positive, he always had encouragement and nice things to say to the ones who were playing. When someone is like that, it’s impossible to dislike them.”

McCarthy, now the head coach of Kenya’s national team, recalls the final of the 2004 Intercontinental Cup when Porto took on Colombia’s Once Caldas in Yokohama, Japan. It was a tense and closely fought game and, in the second period of extra time, the score was still 0-0, heading towards the nerve-shredding drama of a penalty shootout.

“All of a sudden, our goalkeeper, Vitor Baia, got the strangest issue and said he couldn’t play any more. I’m not sure if he was afraid of the penalties and worried that he could not assist the team, but he said he had to go off.

“Nuno was brought on and suddenly he was running on the pitch shouting, ‘All right guys, this is me now, I’m saving two penalties and we’re lifting the cup’. He just had an aura about him that, even in the most pressurised moments, he could make a joke.

“He didn’t even run straight to his goalmouth. Instead, he cut across the middle of the pitch, running between everyone. That smile, that aura. ‘I’m saving two penalties! We’re going to be the champions!’ We so badly wanted to be known as the best team in the world. And guess what happened… he saved two penalties and we were world champions.”

“He was a very good goalkeeper,” says Augusto Cesar Lendoiro, the former president of Deportivo la Coruna, recalling the negotiations that led to Nuno’s transfer to the club from Portuguese side Vitoria in 1997.

Nuno was Mendes’ first client and the move to La Coruna was the first transfer arranged by the man who went on to assume the mantle of ‘superagent’, representing Cristiano Ronaldo, Jose Mourinho and a host of football’s other A-listers.

Nuno during his playing days at Porto in 2009 (MIGUEL RIOPA/AFP via Getty Images)

“That signing was the baptism of the good Jorge Mendes,” says Lendoiro. “That’s why he calls me godfather and I call him godson.

“He (Nuno) was the goalkeeper for Portugal’s Olympics team and, at the time, he had a great future. He didn’t have much luck at Deportivo, and he didn’t play much, but he was a great professional.

“He always had a special air: the way he handled himself in the dressing room, how he treated his team-mates and how he behaved despite not playing much. He was respected because of that behaviour. And he had the innate ability to become a coach.”

Not everyone was convinced Nuno was cut out to be a manager. Even some of his closest friends imagined he would quit the sport for good once he had hung up his gloves.

“Nuno was always very calculated and business-like,” says McCarthy. “He was the guy who would advise you about life after football, about doing the right things financially and looking after your money. So I always thought he would be an entrepreneur somewhere. When I heard he had become a manager, I was kinda shocked. ‘Oh my God, Nuno went into management?’”

Speak to Mendes, though, and he sounds completely unsurprised by the career path of the man who finished seventh in the Premier League twice with Wolves, equalled Valencia’s record points total in Spain, led Portuguese club Rio Ave to their first-ever European qualification and won the Saudi Pro League with Al Ittihad.

“I saw more of a future for him as a coach than a player,” says Mendes, who recalls Nuno’s part in the glory years at Porto and why Mourinho made him his first-ever signing for the club in 2002. “Even though he (Nuno) was the substitute goalkeeper, he was the one who motivated the group in the talks. He commanded the group.”

At some point, Nuno will give serious consideration to becoming Portugal’s national coach. For now, however, that is something the 51-year-old will keep for the future.

He is happy at Forest and, though it is not a driving factor in his life, he can take a lot of satisfaction that he has reminded everyone he should not be defined by his brief, problematic spell at Tottenham Hotspur. His contract at Forest expires next year and his representatives are waiting to see what happens.

What can be said with certainty is that the rewards could be huge if Nuno’s men — the first team in the Premier League to double their points from one season to the next — beat Chelsea on Sunday, and other results go their way, in a potential Champions League decider.

“He’s a very special man,” says Yates. “He’s very different to anyone I’ve come across before. But, more than anything, he’s obviously incredible at his job. It’s incredible for the club to orchestrate Forest to their first European success in 30 years. It speaks for itself. Incredible.”

Whatever happens this weekend, Forest’s manager won’t say a great deal in the media afterwards. But that’s Nuno — elite, worldly, slightly elusive, completely unpigeonholeable (if such a word existed) and, to borrow a line from the Lonely Planet guide on Sao Tome and Principe, standing before us as “one of the continent’s most special secrets”.

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; George Wood, David Rogers/Getty Images)

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