Jorge Jesus Takes Over Portugal's National Team on a Four-Year Deal, With Pepe as His Deputy

Portugal has a new national football coach, and a very familiar one. The Federação Portuguesa de Futebol (Portuguese Football Federation, or FPF) presented Jorge Jesus on Friday afternoon as the successor to Roberto Martínez, handing the 71-year-old a four-year contract that runs through 2030. It is, remarkably, the first time in a coaching career stretching back nearly four decades that Jesus will lead a national team rather than a club.

The vacancy opened abruptly. Martínez resigned within minutes of Portugal's 1-0 defeat to Spain in the last 16 of the World Cup, a stoppage-time loss that ended the campaign and, the Spaniard suggested, his own tenure. The federation moved quickly to a candidate it knows well and who knows Portuguese football intimately.

A club man takes the national job

Jesus began managing in 1989-90 at Amora, then in the third tier, and built a reputation over the following decades at Benfica, Sporting and, most famously, at Brazil's Flamengo, where he won a league-and-Copa Libertadores double that made him a celebrity across the Atlantic. He has spent recent seasons in Saudi Arabia. What he has never done is manage between international windows, where a coach sees his players in short, intense bursts rather than every day on the training ground — a very different craft from the club management at which he has spent his life.

One of his first moves points to how he intends to bridge that gap. Jesus is expected to bring in the former Portugal international Pepe as his assistant, having reportedly extended a direct invitation to the recently retired defender. Pairing a veteran tactician with a dressing-room leader who played at the highest level until his forties is a clear bid to keep the current squad on side through a delicate transition.

The in-tray

That transition is the real challenge. Portugal reached the last 16 but went out without ever convincing, and the golden generation that has defined the Seleção for a decade is thinning. The largest question mark hovers over Cristiano Ronaldo, who at 41 has left his international future open after what many assume was his final World Cup. Jesus must decide how central a role, if any, the all-time leading scorer plays in a squad that needs to be rebuilt around younger talent before the next qualifying cycle.

He inherits enviable raw material — a deep pool of attacking talent and a core of players in their prime at Europe's biggest clubs — but also the weight of expectation that comes with it. Portuguese fans have grown used to their team being a genuine contender at every tournament, and a semi-final or better is the unspoken minimum.

For a coach who has won almost everything at club level but never managed a country, the appointment is both a crowning honour and a late-career gamble. The first competitive tests will show quickly whether Jesus can translate four decades of touchline experience into the stop-start rhythm of international management — and whether he can coax one more deep run out of a squad in the middle of changing its skin.