When Swansea City hired Vitor Matos in November 2025, the conversation around the club was about staying up. He had managed 12 senior games in his life, all of them in the Portuguese second division with Maritimo. Ten matches into this season the Swans are top of the Championship, with seven wins, and the appointment looks like one of the better calls an EFL board has made recently.
Matos is 38. Behind those 12 games sit 23 years of coaching across several continents, including five years at Liverpool as an elite development coach under Jurgen Klopp and a spell at Red Bull Salzburg as Pep Lijnders' assistant. Speaking to BBC Sport's Umir Irfan, he was open about how much of his football comes from Anfield.
Counter-pressing first, everything else after
"Liverpool influenced me a lot in terms of counter-pressing, pressing, intensity, and what makes you grow as a team," he said. "The most important thing is how much you believe in your idea and this style is how I see football. That's why I wanted this to be the foundation for our team."
That foundation came with a practical purpose when he replaced Alan Sheehan. His first job, as he describes it, was psychological: make the players confident again, make them enjoy playing with each other. The route he chose was aggression without the ball. A high regain or a hard tackle lifts a dressing room in a way a sideways pass never will, and he leaned on that deliberately.
He also settled an argument the squad had been having with itself. Swansea had been switching between a back four and a back five; Matos decided the players he inherited suited a four and left it alone. A 4-3-3 that presses, counter-presses and takes the risks that come with it.
Ten games later he is the only Championship manager who has not had to explain a bad month.
Porto, China and the search for a free player
The build-up play comes from somewhere else. "When I spent time with the youth of FC Porto, I developed my understanding of positional play," he said. "We used a very positional 4-3-3, understanding the spaces, the timings, waiting for the ball to arrive to you at the right time."
It worked.
Positional play has always been about finding the unmarked man. Against a zonal defence that is straightforward enough — occupy the gap, force a defender to come across, create a free player somewhere else. Against man-to-man marking, which far more teams now use, the free player can simply stop existing. Matos says he found his answer to that in China, at Shandong Taishan.
"There is a benefit to having more players close to each other, rather than spreading them over space," he explained. "If you spread them over space, you are demanding that, technically, they can solve many situations one-v-one. If they come closer to the ball, you can generate more possibilities." Then the switch: "Let's exchange the ball here five times, eight times and then when we go, we really go."
The full-backs do the dirty work
His two full-backs are the tools he uses to break a defensive plan. "With our two full-backs, we can tweak a lot of things because these are normally positions where, especially if the opposition defend zonally, it's harder to press," he said. An opponent has to decide who covers those spaces, and the decision itself creates imbalance.
What stands out across the whole interview is how little of it is about systems. Matos keeps returning to the individual players, their backgrounds, what they can and cannot do yet. "Only when you are yourself can you really add value to something," he said, and credited Klopp for the lesson. "How he was as a leader, how he took care of the club, how he took care of the players — that moulded a lot of me."
Background: Vitor Matos, 38, took charge of Swansea City in November 2025, replacing Alan Sheehan. He had previously managed 12 senior games at Maritimo in the Portuguese second division, after five years as an elite development coach at Liverpool under Jurgen Klopp and a spell as Pep Lijnders' assistant at Red Bull Salzburg. Swansea have won seven of their first 10 Championship games this season. Interview: BBC Sport.
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