Jorge Nuno Pinto da Costa (1937-2025) – an obituary | OneFootball

It is the end of an era. At least that was the commonly shared notion when, on 5 January 2014 Eusébio da Silva Ferreira passed away. The same can be said now that Jorge Nuno Pinto da Costa has died after struggling with illness over the last few years.

A different era has ended in Portuguese football as well as within Portuguese society. Pinto da Costa and Eusébio were the biggest football figures in Portugal of the 20th century. One on the pitch, the other off the pitch, came to represent different eras, different ways to live the game and different hegemonic periods for the football clubs of their lives.

That the former FC Porto president can be seen at the same historical height of one of the world’s greatest ever footballers says much about his legacy and the role he had to play in transforming Portuguese football completely. Looking back on the history of the game there are few chairmen/presidents who command such respect, such devotion, such hate.

A recognition of being able to draw in the sand a before and an after. Santiago Bernabeu, Real Madrid’s iconic leader, was one of them. Pinto da Costa, the one who rivalled him in titles won during his forty-two-year tenure as leader of the Dragões, is another.

Pinto da Costa is what the modern FC Porto is all about. He was not the only one who contributed to the Azuis e Brancos golden era, but he became the symbol of that changing of the guard and the common thread that spread from the arrival of José Maria Pedroto – on his behalf – to the last days of Sérgio Conceição. He redefined the club, its ethos, its political and social significance and was a pioneering figure in many ways in a country that still lagged behind their European neighbours when he first got the keys of the castle.

Well-to-do family background

Contrary to what he tried to sell over the years, he was not a man of the people. Born in a comfortably set family in Porto in 1937, he came from one of those typical bourgeois families that had shaped the city’s identity for ages. From his family side he descended from a Baron and his father was a businessman rich enough to be able to afford him private lessons from an early age – as well as to his brothers, one of whom, José Eduardo, became one of Portugal´s most celebrated physicians – up until his tenure at a Jesuit college. When Pinto da Costa finished school, he had a job waiting for him in a bank and, around the same time, his love for FC Porto paved the way for him to start collaborating with some amateur sports sections, first roller hockey and later boxing, where he met a longtime companion, Reinaldo Teles, who would be his deputy for more than three decades.

A supporter of the city’s football club since a tender age, a regular at the old Constituição and then the newly inaugurated Antas stadium, Pinto da Costa was first elected for a position on the club’s board in 1969, a position he held for a couple of years, before distancing himself from the then president. Yet, all those years in the boardroom and moving in the late-night inner circles of journalists, directors and managers served him well.

Pedroto friendship struck up and Portuguese football changes forever

During those long nights drinking and playing cards in famous Porto cafés such as Orfeu, he embraces a friendship with José Maria Pedroto. Pedroto had been one of Portugal’s greatest ever midfielders, a record-signing for the club back in 1952, two-time league champion and a former manager of the club in the 1960s. He was also the most talented manager Portugal had ever produced up until then, as the results of his tenure with Porto, Vitória Setúbal and then Boavista proved. He had been sacked from the Porto job after losing a power fight with influential players in the dressing room, but refused to stay silent about it, publicly criticizing the then president Afonso Pinto de Magalhães up to a point that he had Pedroto expelled as a sócio (member) of the club.

Pedroto vowed to return and in Pinto da Costa he found a kindred spirit. Those nights taught many lessons to Pinto da Costa about the world of football, on and off the pitch, and when Américo de Sá, then Porto president, invited him to become Director of Football, he first refused only to accept a couple of days later, after Pedroto’s Boavista signed Albertino, a player he expected to be bound for Porto. Pinto da Costa had only one condition: to bring Pedroto with him. Sá acquiesced and from 1976 on the duo proved to be the dynamite Portuguese football didn’t know it needed.

Aggressive demeanour pays immediate dividends

Those were the post-Carnation Revolution years and that rebellious spirit entered football with the warlike style of Pinto da Costa, his political stance against Centralism, represented by the dominion of Portuguese football of Benfica and Sporting, and the transfer to the north of the economic heartbeat of the country. Everything connected so that FC Porto led the way and Pedroto full fielded his promise by winning back-to-back league titles for Porto, after a long eighteen-year drought, wins he dedicated to Pinto da Costa’s warrior mentality.

Politics, however, also played against the duo as Sá, an MP for the conservative CDS party, sacked Pedroto forcing Pinto da Costa to resign and the squad to enter the first strike against their own club. A couple of years passed by when a group of Porto sócios and northern businessmen approached Pinto da Costa to place himself as a candidate for the presidency in 1982. He had his doubts, at first, but then accepted the challenge and won a landslide victory.

He found a bankrupt club and over the following decade did everything to turn things around. He flipped between giant sports manufacturers Puma and Adidas to get the best possible deal – for a season the club played with shirts of both brands – and was a pioneer by adding a sponsorship in the front of the blue and white shirt, after striking a deal with a local company, Revigres. He also decided to expand the Antas stadium to increase gate revenue and was decisive in setting up the Liga de Clubes, a counter-power to the Portuguese Football Federation, decisive in dealing in the first TV deals once satellite television landed in Portugal.

Indomitable Dragon brand adopted

The Liga, of course, was headquartered in Porto as another example of his perennial struggles against the powers that be set in Lisbon, a warlike discourse translated not only into football fandom but also in a power struggle against the right-wing government of Cavaco Silva. In the meantime, he also sponsored the birth of the first ultra groups, like Super Dragões, the birth of a club magazine – Dragões – and a new brand identity focused on the image of the all-conquering Dragon.

Of course all of this only bared its fruits because he also was able to get Porto back on the winning track on the pitch. Not only winning but winning a lot and against continental rivals as well as domestic. In 1983 FC Porto clinched the Portuguese Cup, which they won again in the following season. By then Pedroto was already almost in his deathbed, a victim of cancer, so he could not attend the club’s first ever European final, lost against Juventus. His touted successor, however, Artur Jorge, improved on his mentor’s record. He won back-to-back league titles and then the European Cup in 1987, one of the greatest achievements in Portuguese history, by beating Bayern Munich in Vienna. The following season the club won all the competitions they played in but the European Cup – beaten by Real Madrid in the last eight – including the European Super Cup and the Intercontinental trophy.

“Pope” Pinto da Costa

For the following seven seasons they divided the major honours in Portuguese football with Benfica, debuted in the first-ever edition of the Champions League and as a new generation of players succeeded the former continental winners, Porto embarked on a historical run of five consecutive league titles, a feat nobody has ever matched. By then Pinto da Costa was already seen as the most important and powerful figure in Portuguese football, deeply hated by his southern rivals and embraced almost as a cult-figure by Porto’s supporters who fondly called him “The Pope”.

In those years the first allegations of match-fixing by corrupting referees and the establishment of a power network that included several northern clubs who benefited from Porto’s help with loaned players and financial back-up came to the surface, but the truth was that on the pitch the Dragões were simply impossible to beat.

Yet, every golden hour has its end and for Porto it came with the change of the millennium. The club had been converted to a SAD, works on a new stadium paved the way for a tribal war against the municipality led by conservative politician Rui Rio, and Porto entered a three-year stint without winning the league, Pinto da Costa longest trophy-less spell.

More glory with Mourinho

His glorious run could have ended there but then José Mourinho came to town. He already knew the club from his days as Bobby Robson’s assistant and Pinto da Costa went all in to get him from Leiria to guide a heartless squad back to winning ways. Mourinho delivered, of course, and in two complete seasons won two leagues, a Portuguese Cup, a UEFA Cup and, most of all, the Champions League. The club remain the last team outside the big four leagues to claim to title.

With European success came money. Lots of it. Porto was already a seller in the transfer market but over the following decade they became renowned as one of the most successful clubs at buying cheap, selling high, all the while keeping on winning. Many believed it was all Pinto da Costa’s doing, making him a larger-than-life figure, more important to the club than any manager or footballer, as they came and went but the club remained at the top.

Corruption charges, fleeing to Spain and a permanently tarnished image

Only in 2004 the Golden Whistle affair came out and Pinto da Costa was charged, along with the football club, of sporting corruption. Things got nasty. He first was rumoured to have attempted to escape over the northern border to Vigo, then came back to Porto only to present himself in court accompanied by the ultra-group that since then became a sort of Pretorian Guard for their emperor.

Eventually the accusations were dropped but illegal voice taps were leaked on internet, and everyone was able to hear how Pinto da Costa conducted business. Despite being cleared judicially, his image was tarnished and the gracious and cynical Pinto da Costa paved way for a more silent figure, operating ever more in the background. The club proceeded in his relative silence for the following fifteen years, but the accusations only enforced the sense of devotion from many supporters and his “us against the world” mentality. Up until the side kept on winning, at least.

In 2011 there was a sense the golden years were back when André Villas-Boas guided Porto to an historic season, then Vitor Pereira won back-to-back titles, including a dramatic last-minute winner against Benfica in 2013, which only seemed to reinforce the good times were back. But then everything fell apart. Pinto da Costa, known for almost always selecting the right manager, entered a streak where every decision he made seemed to fail miserably. The club also stopped profiting from sales as costs skyrocketed and a network of football agents, who usually surrounded his estranged son Alexandre, grew in relevance within the club. The same could be said of the ultra-group Super Dragões, and little by little, the club run so successfully became a dying monarchy.

Old habits die hard

Pinto da Costa was never able to adapt to newer times where deals were no longer sealed in pubs during the night between old-school directors but were now in the hands of more bureaucratic figures working for clubs who resembled multinationals.

Out of touch with the new sporting world his dependency on certain agents grew and when he signed desperately Sérgio Conceição, not even his third option, his time seemed to be up. Only Conceição, against all odds, won a league that prevented Benfica from equalling Porto’s historic Penta championship run of the 1990s and then won two more over the course of the following three seasons. By doing that he came to be the main figure of the club but also brought oxygen to a Pinto da Costa figure already in shreds.

When Conceição started to lose is grip, however, the old sins of the past came back to haunt him. UEFA had suspended the club for breaches on the Financial Fair Play agreement, there was a huge debt increasing by the year and the club was up for grabs. There were no signs of the old-time Pinto da Costa leadership and in that turmoil, his former manager André Villas-Boas appeared out of nowhere, after a tumultuous general assembly where the Porto president watched in silence as his ultras attacked club members who dared to oppose him. It became clear to all that Pinto da Costa no longer looked for the club as anything different to a private kingdom but even if his legacy was impossible to replicate, he was in for a surprise when Villas-Boas ousted him from the presidency months after with an astonishing 80% win.

The infirm emperor is ousted

The end of Pinto da Costa’s reign as Porto president marked the beginning of a new era but by them, he already knew he had only few months to live, having being diagnosed with cancer a couple of years before. He still believed that he could stay in power up until his death, like any emperor of old. By doing that he helped tarnish even more his legacy, an undignified end for a figure that was fundamental for the club’s history as well as the history of Portuguese football itself.

Looking retrospectively, there are clearly two different stages in Pinto da Costa’s life in football. The first up until 2004, throws the concept of a revolutionary, a man way ahead of his time, a leader who pioneered changes that helped Portuguese football to evolve at a different pace. He set up a school of thought as many presidents from different clubs, including his rivals, followed his example over the years. He knew what to do and how to do it to win and resuscitated a club that had been illustrious for many years but was on a low when he took the helm. By doing so, establishing a dynasty that lasted for almost half a century, he became with Eusébio the most important figure of Portuguese football by a mile.

Yet, after 2004 and the Golden Whistle affair, a darker side came to life, not only with the accusations and the leaked tapes but with a change in how he embraced his tenure as president. The club entered a death spiral financially, parted ways with the very same concepts that had made them greats decades before and resembled more of a Latin American style dictatorship than anything else.

The man who took Porto to heaven also lowered them to hell. Only time will tell which version will last. Probably both, depending on what people are looking at, and where people are looking from.

What’s undeniable is the fact his influence changed Portuguese football profoundly and he will be forever remembered for that.