Greatest of All Legends

Chapter 258: Consequences of Loss

Normally, the Benfica fans had nothing to fear from the Porto team, but the truth of the matter remained that they had lost the title of champions of the Liga NOS to the Porto team the previous season, and even worse, they had been unable to defeat them in any of the three times that they had met in the previous season both in the season campaign matches and during a domestic cup campaign.

Yet even with that, the Benfica fans were a fiery bunch who didn’t think they would keep losing to the Porto team just because that was the current sequence, but optimism and realism were two different things.

The Benfica fans had optimism that their team could turn the tides in the coming season, and when they heard about the Porto team losing quite a few of their important first-team players, their optimism slowly started turning to confidence, but reality had thrown a harsh slap in their face.

The Porto team that had lost their important players was currently decimating another team with less than their full power on display.

Moreso since this was their first pre-season game of the season which meant that the players who had just come back from their holidays were performing at this level.

With the knowledge that the Porto team had yet to return to full fitness, were using a much weaker line-up due to fitness and injury concerns, and yet were still smashing through their opponents, the Benfica fans’ confidence wavered and their optimism cooled off.

This was exactly what Sergio Conceicao had hoped for when he had continuously given attacking-based instructions to his players and wanted them to utterly decimate their opponents.

He wanted a situation reminiscent of what was going on between Manchester United and Manchester City to repeat itself.

In the last few years, Manchester City had established itself as the top team in the English football world, a position that once belonged to the Manchester United team… or the noisy neighbors as some would call them.

Some Manchester United fans, as well as a few others still tried to believe that according to their past glory, Manchester United could somehow stand up to the Manchester City team.

In reality, the difference between the two teams wasn’t much different in literally every section, except for their achievements.

The two teams had players of similar pedigree, they both had a lot of finances to spare, and they both had a huge following, but while the Manchester United side had history, the Manchester City side had recent achievements, and this had turned into a momentum that nobody could ignore.

It was especially helpful for messing with the psychology of the opponents and Sergio Conceicao currently needed this effect.

He wasn’t an idiot and he knew that there was no way Porto could match up to Manchester City in anything but history, especially with his team in a dire situation.

The team had lost quite a few of their important players and though the team had gotten some extra funds from the sale of those players to reinvest into the team, he also knew that the funds were nowhere near enough to cater to all the needs of the team.

With the funds he had available, where was he supposed to find a player as good as Alex Telles in attacking from behind, being an excellent playmaker, and also being a dead-ball specialist?

Alex Telles was probably in the top five best-performing left-backs in the 2019/20 season worldwide, which meant there was a hole that big in their ranks after he left and Sergio Conceicao was supposed to manage that somehow while also catering to the loss of three of his team’s strikers.

He might not show it, but it was currently a dire situation, and he was already making efforts to close up the hole… Yet he feared that his efforts may not be enough.

He had brought in a young left back with potential in the person of Zaidu Sanusi, but honestly speaking he didn’t think that guy could match up to Alex Telles in any aspect so far.

That was how much the loss of Telles had cost him, but unfortunately, he couldn’t ignore the team’s desperate need for a forward and focus on bringing a player as good as Alex Telles into the back line.

Even if he could, how was he going to do it?

With which funds?

Players as good as Alex Telles would probably command a transfer fee of at least 60 million Euros depending on their age and there was no way the Porto executive board would cough up that much money for a singular player, especially with the current financial situation.

Thus he was stuck patching all sorts of holes in all of his previous tactics due to the loss of many pivotal players.

Telles’s playmaking skill was gone from his game plan options, Tiquinho Soares’s ball-holding and evading skills up front were gone, Vincent Aboubakar’s crazy physicality was gone, Ze Luis’s clutch moments were gone and now he had to adjust his tactics accordingly.

The problem he had wasn’t changing the tactics, the problem was how long it would take his players to adjust to such changes.

The changes he would be making to the tactics would need an adjustment period from the players and during the adjustment period, the team could end up losing important games that could make or break their season campaign.

It would be even worse if such a thing happened on the continental stage.

He was already doing all he could to make the necessary adjustments during the pre-season period so that the players could adjust in time for the beginning of the season, but even now, the team was incomplete.

He hadn’t finished player negotiations and some players were still going to join the team after pre-season was over.

There were also injured players like Jesus Corona, Shoya Nakajima, and Jason, who would be joining the team much later due to their injuries.

All these factors aside, Sergio Conceicao could only hope that things worked out for the team in the end otherwise the upcoming season may end up spiraling out of their control.

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