Weekly Review 3 June 2023 – Vitor Campelos anyone?

After the inertia since Cardiff City preserved their Championship status five weeks ago, there has been a feeling of things starting to move in a week which ends with it being almost certain that we have got our new manager – even if I swear no City fans will have heard of him before Thursday when his name was first linked with the job!

Actually, I should qualify that – if any City supporters had truly heard of Vitor Campelos before this week, I salute them as a far better qualified aficionado of the European, particularly the Portuguese, game than I am!

When I first read of our interest in Mr Campelos in a Tweet a few days ago, I headed straight for his Wikipedia page and, frankly, as I went through it paragraph by paragraph, I found myself thinking this must be a joke, not even City would appoint a nobody like this.

For a start, Campelos had not played the game at professional level. Now, there are enough good managers around who weren’t good enough players to reach even a modest professional level for this not to be a problem for me. However, I’m also not green enough to imagine that they faced many a sceptical dressing room when they were first making their way in the game – the conversation would have been along the lines of the cliched “show us your medals”.

If Vitor Campelos comes here and is finding things a struggle, you can guarantee that this is a subject which will come up somewhere along the line, but, having been working in the game for about fifteen years now, he will have surely comes across it before.

Back to that Wikipedia page, as I ploughed on through the jobs in charge of reserve teams in Hungary’s Third Division and in Saudi Arabia and the UAE still not finding anything to suggest he was the man to take on what is, increasingly, looking to be a very tough job (the Second Tier podcast was telling all and sundry that City were in the worst position of any of the twenty four teams in the 23/24 Championship currently and I found it hard to argue with them) I was asking myself why him? There must be something here to indicate why Campelos had been interviewed twice, as reported in the Tweet I read, for the vacant manager’s job, but what is it?

Slowly, but surely, little signs that there might be something more to Campelos than first meets the eye began to emerge until the final few sentences of his Wikipedia biography showed why someone at City had hit upon his as a possible next manager of the club. For a start, although he had begun at a very low level, there was no question that his career path has been upward to the extent that around a decade after first breaking into the game, Campelos was managing in the top flight of the Portuguese game.

The fact that he was out of a job within six months suggested that Campelos may have reached his ceiling and when another job in Saudi Arabia went badly, his career was at a crossroads. However, from the moment he was appointed at Chaves, who were in the Portuguese Second Division at the time, in early 2021, Campelos’ career has been on a different plane.

It’s significant that all but one of the references used to help compile Campelos’ Wikipedia page are from 2021 or later. This backs up what the facts tell you – it was at this point people started taking notice of Mr Campelos.

In 21/22, Vitor Campelos was chosen as Portuguese Second Division Manager of the month on three occasions as his side finished fifth and were promoted via the Play Offs. More impressively, Chaves were widely credited as having over performed in 22/23 as they finished seventh in the top flight (that’s one place short of the club’s best ever finishing position).

In fact, you get the feeling Chaves could have finished higher, but the club’s owners made the decision not to make the stadium improvements required to host European football on the grounds that it was too much to pay out for something that was not guaranteed. The first six qualify for European football in Portugal and the decision not to compete in UEFA competitions was taken before the end of the season, so it’s possible that there was an element of anti climax to the closing stages of Chaves’ campaign.

While it’s possible to see why the club made the decision not to spend the money needed to host European football, it’s also clear that those on the playing side would have been disappointed by such a decision.

Therefore, there was an expectation that Campelos might well decide not to extend his contract at Chaves when it runs out at the end of this month and, sure enough, there was an announcement from the club yesterday that their manager was leaving with the suggestion that he had a new project lined up in another country. The statement also hinted that, wherever Campelos was going, his technical staff would be going with him, so, if he is to be our new manager, does that mean that we may well have seen the end of Dean Whitehead and Sol Bamba’s time with us as both of their contracts are up on the thirtieth of this month?

Trying to put all of this into a domestic context, you have to think that a manager who took over at a smallish club, got it promoted into the Premier League on a shoestring budget and then almost qualified them for Europe would be the subject of speculation linking them with bigger clubs.

Indeed, t would say that there are some similarities with Nathan Jones and Luton. Jones got his chance with a bigger club. In fact, he got it twice and the fact that he was sacked at both Stoke and, very quickly, at Southampton has created the suspicion that he can only work his magic at one club – by the same token, for all that he did at Chaves, Vitor Campelos has to prove that it was not a one off or some sort of fluke.

Jones became the bookies favourite for the City job for a while last week and I still feel we could do a lot worse than appoint him, but it’s hard not to believe that if it hasn’t happened by now, it’s not going to with the Blaenrhondda born man.

The other name which came to the fore in the last seven days was Oscar Garcia who has a CV as a player and manager, in terms of clubs he’s been employed at, which easily beats anything Jones and Campelos can come up with.

However, Garcia, who has Championship experience after taking Brighton to the Play Offs in 13/14 and worked, very briefly, for Watford, has never stayed anywhere longer than eighteen months in his managerial/coaching career and his record over the first half of that career is much more impressive than the second half is. While Garcia’s lack of longevity in his jobs might be seen as hardly a problem when it comes to someone who hires and fires managers as regularly as Vincent Tan has lately, it was something which made me not as keen on us appointing him as some others were.

Returning to Vitor Campelos, my thanks to the messageboard posters who found these articles on him and his Chaves team

https://portugoal.net/club-news/3181-portugoal-figure-of-the-week-vitor-campelos-chaves-charges-stun-below-par-benfica

https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/12884305/vitor-campelos-exclusive-interview-on-taking-chaves-to-the-brink-of-europe-only-for-president-not-to-register-the-club

https://theanalyst.com/eu/2022/08/portuguese-primeira-liga-stats-2022-23/

Reading those three pieces, what cannot be denied is that Campelos did a superb job during the two and a half years he was at Chaves. The question no one can answer with any certainty at the moment is whether someone capable of performing to that level has always been there waiting to be given the chance to show their worth? It’s possible, but, there has to be an equal chance that Vitor Campelos’ time at Chaves was his “fifteen minutes of fame” and, away from them, he’ll revert to being the peripheral figure he was for the rest of his football career.

Of course, the chance, albeit a pretty faint one I’d guess, that Campelos doesn’t end up at City cannot be discounted – I may be jumping the gun here. I hope I’m not, because, whatever else it turns out to be, this strikes me as a brave and totally unexpected call by City of the sort I did not think the current hierarchy had in them.

I’ve not got a clue whether Vitor Campelos will succeed or fail as City manager, but, it seems to me that, if there’s any justice, it will be the former. If you can’t be optimistic about a new manager when they first come to your club, when can you be?

Apparently, Hull City were interested in appointing Campelos last autumn before they settled for Liam Rosenior, so you’d like to think this is not some left field punt from Tan and co picked because he wouldn’t cost us much. There are all sorts of reasons why the appointment will not work, but those two and a half years at Chaves offer at least the hope that “shrewd”, a word hardly ever used in relation to Cardiff City in the past ten years or so, could be appropriate here. However, for now, “intriguing” seems to be better suited.