{"id":100092,"date":"2025-10-24T17:58:53","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T17:58:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/?p=100092"},"modified":"2025-10-24T17:58:53","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T17:58:53","slug":"portuguese-manager-rui-abreu-opens-up-to-joy-sports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/?p=100092","title":{"rendered":"Portuguese manager Rui Abreu opens up to Joy Sports"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>6 Minute, 25 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>
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One year ago, Rui Abreu made the decision to leave his boyhood club Pa\u00e7os de Ferreira for a new adventure in Rio Ave. Little did he know it, but he\u2019d soon be crawling back just six months later.<\/p>\n

Born on December 10, 1986, Abreu was raised in Pa\u00e7os de Ferreira, a municipality of around 50,000 people that is located on the outskirts of Porto. It was here in northern Portugal where Abreu began attending Pa\u00e7os de Ferreira matches with his grandfather, in addition to also watching his father referee games. Whilst he never pursued a playing career, Abreu remained keenly interested in watching Pa\u00e7os matches, balancing his support with his burgeoning career. After graduating from the Polytechnic Institute of Bragan\u00e7a with a Bachelor\u2019s degree in Clinical and Public Health Sciences in 2009, Abreu worked at IKEA as a translator and quality inspector before spending nine months teaching hematology in Angola. He worked as an Occupational Medicine Technician for Ac\u00e7\u00e3o Cont\u00ednua before leaving the health industry and working as a marketing assistant for furniture exporter Dolaya Lda.<\/p>\n

Abreu initially started working on a volunteer basis with Pa\u00e7os de Ferreira as the \u2018l\u00edder de claque\u2019 or the head cheerleader for the Pa\u00e7os supporters, where he would commit time after work to meeting with police, arranging transportation for supporters, dealing with ticketing issues, and more, before being promoted to the club\u2019s marketing and communications manager. He left Dolaya in 2021 and started working full-time with Pa\u00e7os, who would end up shocking the nation by finishing fifth and qualifying for Europe in 2022, only to suffer relegation two years later. And after failing to secure promotion in their return to the Segunda, Abreu decided to call it quits with Pa\u00e7os after seven years in their communications department and join top-flight outfit Rio Ave in September 2024 as the club\u2019s new marketing manager. However, he began to be bombarded with calls and messages by Pa\u00e7os supporters who asked him to come back and run for president and save them from a nightmare. The Beavers found themselves in danger of dropping down to the semi-professional third division, prompting Paulo Meneses, who brought Abreu to the club, to step down as president after 12 years at the helm. Abreu filed his candidacy on the final deadline day, and when the only other candidate \u2013 local businessman Pedro Andrade \u2013 being prevented from taking part after refusing to join until after the season, he unanimously won the presidency.<\/p>\n

\u201cFootball is an ungrateful world where you wake up, you work hard, you go to bed knowing that you did everything in your power to do the best for the institution you represent, and even so, there\u2019ll be someone who will say that you are rubbish who did something wrong,\u201d stated Abreu in an exclusive Joy News interview. \u201cRightly so, there\u2019s a lot of lies around you, a lot of gratitude, a lot of campaigning against you, and that\u2019s why it\u2019s hard to see that some people do everything to diminish you. These past few six months, I\u2019ve developed a lot of gray in my beard that I didn\u2019t have before, so in 2027, when my two-year term finishes, it\u2019ll be all white.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the first time I\u2019ve prepared for a similar role. It\u2019s not easy, and it gets even harder with all the difficulties, because everyone brings you problems and almost no one brings you solutions. When you manage a marketing department, your scope of action is much smaller and you often end up not being able to do things because your superiors say it\u2019s not possible, and that\u2019s it. Now, with the position I\u2019m in today, I can\u2019t shift the blame onto anybody; what goes well is my responsibility, but what goes wrong is also my responsibility. Fortunately, here at the club, people have tried to help me, and management has tried to help me with these tasks, but it is very demanding. It\u2019s something that, no matter how much you study, no matter how much you prepare for a role like this, taking on a club as big as Pa\u00e7os, in the state it\u2019s in, is a very complicated challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pa\u00e7os managed to stave off the drop by the narrowest of margins, losing 2-1 to Belenenses in the promotion\/relegation playoffs before winning 1-0 at home thanks to a penalty goal from Vitorino Antunes to force extra time, where they prevailed 2-1 thanks to a goal from Vladislav Morozov to secure their spot in the Portuguese second tier. But rather than splurge in the summer transfer window, Abreu opted for a more conservative approach; according to Transfermarkt, they signed 13 new players for a combined \u20ac0, in addition to selling Ivan Pavlic to Belgian champions Union Saint-Gilloise for \u20ac250,000 and allowing a host of other players to depart on loans or free transfers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf things were to happen for Pa\u00e7os to challenge to go up, we would of course fight for promotion, we wouldn\u2019t lose games on purpose to avoid promotion. But the truth is, the squad wasn\u2019t built to fight for promotion, and we didn\u2019t place that responsibility on the players. That\u2019s not what was asked of the players or the coaching staff. Obviously, we\u2019ve seen some more humble projects in recent years that have gone to the first division without a big investment, but the truth is this: if my team starts winning now, this positive wave will end up pushing us into a possible fight to go up, and we will do everything to go up. But that\u2019s strictly theoretical. The truth is that we\u2019re far from that, because we\u2019re competing against teams with budgets two, three, and even four times larger than ours.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMoney doesn\u2019t score goals, but it helps us choose the energy that puts the ball in the net and helps us win points, and therefore, Pa\u00e7os tried to restructure himself from an organizational, financial and sporting point of view, to create the conditions so that, in the next season or two seasons from now, it can effectively take on and develop a project for promotion.<\/p>\n

We opted to be a little more conservative at this stage to reorganize things, try our best to not spend what we don\u2019t have, and create the foundations for the person who comes afterwards to have a little more slack and a little more capacity to get into the swing of things. This negative moment sometimes takes away a lot of our lucidity, because every day there are problems, problems, problems, problems. It\u2019s hard to think of new things when you\u2019re constantly being bombarded with problems from the past and having to solve problems from the past. But as I was saying, that\u2019s the goal: to create a more solid base so that I or whoever comes next in 2027 can design a project to promote the club, both in financial terms and in terms of winning games.\u201d<\/p>\n

Similarly to many other Portugueses like Jose Mourinho and Renato Paiva, Abreu is proof that you don\u2019t need to be a great footballer in order to make a name for yourself in football. And after previously serving in a number of different positions, he\u2019s now working in Pa\u00e7os\u2019 most important one: president. Pa\u00e7os occupy the relegation playoff spot after taking just five points from their first seven matches, and they\u2019ll be looking to pick up their first league win at home as they host Portimonense on Saturday.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"PortugueseOne year ago, Rui Abreu made the decision to leave his boyhood club Pa\u00e7os de Ferreira for a new adventure in Rio Ave. Little did he know it, but he\u2019d soon be crawling back just six months later. Born on December 10, 1986, Abreu was raised in Pa\u00e7os de Ferreira, a municipality of around 50,000 [\u2026]<\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_2277560469115098_106292521332774":"","twitter_aToxNzczMzI3Njk4OTg4ODUxMjAxOw==_1773327698988851200":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[137,11149,10,9,11150,11151,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-football","category-pacos-de-ferreira","category-politics","category-popular","category-rio-ave","category-rui-abreu","category-sports"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=100092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100092\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=100092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=100092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=100092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}