Who hired José Mourinho to Benfica coach? Rui Costa, the President, or Rui Costa, the reciplitt? He himself assured that he was as president. Just over 24 hours later, while the team and the new coach went on a bus to the north of the country, the president of the “incarnates” gave the official start to the Benfica elections, scheduled for October 25, where he will be one of the seven names in the voting report, along with the lawyers João Diogo Manteigas and Cristóvão Carvalho, the businessmen João Noronha Lopes and Martim Mayer Luís Filipe Vieira and Paulo Parreira.
At Benfica’s house of Paredes, which celebrates his 26th birthday, Rui Costa presented his candidacy with the motto “Only Benfica matters”.
The now also candidate for the presidency of the “incarnated” assumed the frustration of not being able to get the club more trophies. “It’s a sadness for me not to have achieved more titles in football, no one feels more than me the absence of these titles,” he said.
But later, he made a point of recalling the circumstances in which he assumed Benfica’s presidency in the one he qualified as one of the “most controversial” periods of the club’s history, launching criticism that, at that time, so many candidates have not emerged as now.
“I became president of the night, not to let Benfica fall. I became an unforeseen president, because in the morning I was in the Seixal working with the soccer team and at the end of the day I was president. I do not forget everything I lived during this period. But I did not regret it. At that time I appeared and Francisco Benítez, no one appeared that Benfica, if he needed so much presidential candidates. I hid. And the fact that I re -run is also for that.
