EPL
“Pedro is a football intellectual. He can distil a game model down to a set of simple categories and moments. But if you want to, he can go right down the mineshaft and pick out the tiniest details.”
Simon Wilson is talking about Pedro Marques, who has been appointed director of football development for Fenway Sports Group (FSG) as part of a major shift in strategy as Liverpool’s owner embarks on building a multi-club model.
Advertisement
After resigning from his post as Benfica’s technical director, Marques will start with FSG on June 1, put down roots in Liverpool initially and immerse himself in the culture of the club. His remit, however, extends way beyond Merseyside.
Alongside the returning Julian Ward — who has been appointed FSG’s sporting director — Marques will be a central figure in FSG’s global expansion plans and it is easy to understand why. A decade ago, when Marques was a first-team performance analyst for Manchester City and carving out a reputation as a creative tactical thinker who saw the game through a different lens, Wilson approached him with a similar project in mind.
City Football Group (CFG), the multi-club empire with Manchester City at its heart, was beginning to acquire teams around the world and needed someone with the expertise to roll out its vision across different countries. It was a big job and came with a big title.
Wilson, who was CFG’s director of football services, knew that Marques would be the ideal candidate.
“We were tasked with writing a football blueprint that we could pick up from Manchester and take out to Australia and coach and guide them on how to install that in Melbourne, then the same to New York and all the other clubs as and when they were acquired,” he explains.
“So Pedro came with me into that new section and he was the global lead for football performance.
“Pedro was a really good fit for that because he was analytical and he could also describe a coaching methodology and a way of playing. Pedro could objectively write that down so it was a model that people could follow. He also had the performance-analysis background to measure it as well.”
A keen football and tennis player during his childhood, Marques, 41, studied at degree level in Brazil and Portugal before joining Sporting Lisbon as an academy coach in 2004. He enjoyed being out on the grass but analysing players and matches came naturally to him, too.
In 2008, Marques was promoted to work with the first team at Sporting and thrived, so much so that a master’s degree was put on hold as his career took off – literally; he was flying all over the world to watch players.
Advertisement
“I formed a scouting team, we had four or five young boys and Pedro was the leader,” Pedro Barbosa, the former Portugal international who was sporting director at the time, tells The Athletic. “He was 25, 26 years old then. But even at that time, he showed his ambition, his work ethic and his knowledge.
“Pedro is intelligent, he communicates well and he can bring people together with common objectives. I am really satisfied to see how he has developed. He is now a man with a complete vision of what a team and a club can do. He will be a fantastic person for Liverpool.”
Marques’ first opportunity to work for an English club came about after he impressed Manchester City’s staff during a visit to Sporting, leading to him being offered the chance to move to the Etihad as a first-team performance analyst in 2010.
Although Wilson recalls that Marques needed a bit of persuading initially — City had just finished fifth in the Premier League and were a long way from being the team that they are today — the prospect of working for a club with the ambition and resources to take data in a new direction was too good to turn down.
Prozone provided off-the-shelf data packages to Premier League clubs at that time, but Marques and Gavin Fleig, City’s head of performance analysis, wanted to work in a more creative and bespoke way, pushing the boundaries in their field.
In his role as opposition analyst, Marques became fascinated by team behaviours, the synchrony between players, space dominance and in particular passing patterns.
In his eyes, average player positions were erratic and unreliable. He wanted to have access to the raw data that would enable him to study player positioning and passing sequences in much more detail, redefining the opposition analysis he presented the day before a game under the management of Roberto Mancini and, later on, Manuel Pellegrini, and also shaping training sessions around the same themes.
GO DEEPER
WhatsApp, FOMO and eye-contact: The sporting directors’ guide to negotiating a transfer
Getting and interpreting the data was one thing, but demonstrating the value of it was another, especially at a time when a lot of coaches and players weren’t ready to hear about metrics and algorithms. Marques was astute in that respect, both in terms of how much data he passed on — he knew information overload would be detrimental — and also in how he presented and broke down his findings.
Advertisement
“That’s his skill — simplifying it,” adds Wilson, who was also a former performance analyst.
“But, at the same time, if you want to, and you’re working with somebody who has got that ability, Pedro can go and go and go and go.
“He’s also got shit-hot design skills, so he can pull that down, put it into a very clear video, animate that video, build a slide that is very easy to look at and take the information off quite quickly.
“Analysis is a combination of a few different skills – having a great eye for football is one part of it, but you’ve got to be able to explain that.”
Interestingly, there were times when Marques made a conscious decision not to explain too much. For example, in the unit analysis sessions that he introduced with City’s defenders, when he used footage that was recorded on wide camera angles to give players a different perspective on matches, he wanted to encourage open debate.
If Marques identified something tactical that the players (this was the era of Vincent Kompany, Joleon Lescott, Pablo Zabaleta, Gael Clichy, Micah Richards and Aleksandar Kolarov) didn’t pick up, he would stop the video and ask. But he reasoned that there was far more to be gained from those sessions being player-led and the defenders largely analysing and debriefing matches themselves.
Marques’ passion and enthusiasm for his work at City made him a popular figure across departments. Anyone who has spent time in his company will know that he likes to talk — about football rather than himself.
As well as being a student of the game, he’s erudite, multilingual and affable — all of which convinced Wilson and Brian Marwood, the managing director of global football at CFG, that he was perfect for a role that would require emotional intelligence as well as a sharp tactical mind. After all, it was inevitable that some staff would be anxious about the ramifications of CFG taking over their club.
Advertisement
“Pedro’s very down to earth,” Wilson adds. “He’ll get on a plane and go anywhere and he’ll just get straight off and work with people.”
Being part of the design and inception of a project that was seeking to establish a global footprint in the game was enjoyable and rewarding, but challenging, too.
Putting on a presentation that started with a slide about “beautiful football” was the easy bit.
Marques was living out of hotels in Australia, Japan and the United States for months on end, constantly talking about methodology, going to games all over the world with different teams, connecting and earning the trust of people at all levels, and working across multiple time zones. A victory on one side of the world was balanced by defeat somewhere elsewhere.
By the time Marques moved to Benfica in 2018, CFG had acquired, or had a stake in, six clubs — Manchester City, New York City, Melbourne City, Yokohama Marinos, Girona, and Club Atletico Torque (now Montevideo City Torque).
CFG’s centralised structure worked and its blueprint became easier to implement with each new acquisition. Marques, however, was ready for a change after four years and joining Benfica made sense. At a time when he had a young family, Benfica allowed him to return to Lisbon, his home city, and also to a senior day-to-day role in a one-club structure.
Following the news of his departure, Wilson posted a comment on LinkedIn, thanking Marques for being “a huge part of a really important chapter for MCFC/CFG” and also for how he “taught us all so much with his encyclopaedic football brain”.
Asked to elaborate on that last comment, Wilson smiles. “Pedro could go for days talking about something that perhaps you and I would think: ‘Is that really an important thing?’. In the end, you would find out why that was so significant because he can focus on the absolute minutiae of it. But that doesn’t mean he can’t see the big picture as well.
Advertisement
“It’s the range of things as well. He could talk to you about the sports science side of things, the performance analysis side, the psychology of things – he was just so curious and could take in a lot of that information and put it in a place in his head so that he can connect to people from all sorts of different areas. He’s a really intelligent guy.”
At Benfica, Marques was responsible for leading and coordinating the club’s player development programme, including transitions to the first team. Essentially, he had the keys to one of the best talent factories in Europe in his role as technical director. Except Marques didn’t make it sound like a conveyor belt that kept producing players when The Athletic visited Benfica last year. It was much more personal to him than that.
“We can win the under-15s league — that is a milestone and it’s important,” Marques said. “But a real trophy is when those players achieve their dreams: when they play for Benfica in the stadium and they see the eagle. There is no better feeling. We know it’s very impactful for them as players but also for us.”
As Marques made that last remark, he rolled up his sleeves and smiled. “It gives us goosebumps when we think about it and when we see the boys (in the first team).”
Those who worked closely with Marques at Benfica viewed his open approach, particularly how he acted as a good link between different departments, as a product of his time with CFG.
“The leadership was not autocratic, it was not a case of ‘you have to do it like this’. There were main ideas but every coach had freedom,” says Filipe Coelho, who coached multiple age groups across 17 years at Benfica.
“From the beginning, the big change that I thought Pedro brought about our game in Benfica was the defensive side, which is interesting because if he came from City, you would probably think he would bring more of the positional play and everything else (with the ball), but the coaches in Benfica already had this kind of approach. Pedro brought us to a different line of thinking in our defensive way.”
Advertisement
Intriguingly, Marques took a call from Liverpool early on during his time at Benfica, in the summer of 2019, asking for help rather than offering him a job.
Ward, who was Liverpool’s loan pathways and football partnerships manager at the time, had previously worked with Marques at Manchester City and wondered if his friend could do him a favour by bringing a team to Marbella for a practice game before the Champions League final against Tottenham Hotspur.
Marques was more than happy to oblige. He took Benfica’s B team to Spain for four days, met with Liverpool’s backroom staff before the friendly and talked through how to set up tactically like Spurs. Everything went to plan: Liverpool won 2-0, mirroring the scoreline in the final the following week, and a young Benfica squad went away with shirts as well as memories.
Five years later, it was Michael Edwards, FSG’s new CEO of football and the man whom Ward succeeded as sporting director at Liverpool in 2022, at the other end of the phone. This time, Marques’ services were required for much more than a long weekend.
(Top photo: Benfica; design: Eamonn Dalton)
Subscribe to The Athletic for in-depth coverage of your favorite players, teams, leagues and clubs. Try a week on us.
