One year ago, Rui Abreu made the decision to leave his boyhood club Paços de Ferreira for a new adventure in Rio Ave. Little did he know it, but he’d soon be crawling back just six months later.
Born on December 10, 1986, Abreu was raised in Paços de Ferreira, a municipality of around 50,000 people that is located on the outskirts of Porto. It was here in northern Portugal where Abreu began attending Paços de Ferreira matches with his grandfather, in addition to also watching his father referee games. Whilst he never pursued a playing career, Abreu remained keenly interested in watching Paços matches, balancing his support with his burgeoning career. After graduating from the Polytechnic Institute of Bragança with a Bachelor’s degree in Clinical and Public Health Sciences in 2009, Abreu worked at IKEA as a translator and quality inspector before spending nine months teaching hematology in Angola. He worked as an Occupational Medicine Technician for Acção Contínua before leaving the health industry and working as a marketing assistant for furniture exporter Dolaya Lda.
Abreu initially started working on a volunteer basis with Paços de Ferreira as the ‘líder de claque’ or the head cheerleader for the Paços supporters, where he would commit time after work to meeting with police, arranging transportation for supporters, dealing with ticketing issues, and more, before being promoted to the club’s marketing and communications manager. He left Dolaya in 2021 and started working full-time with Paços, who would end up shocking the nation by finishing fifth and qualifying for Europe in 2022, only to suffer relegation two years later. And after failing to secure promotion in their return to the Segunda, Abreu decided to call it quits with Paços after seven years in their communications department and join top-flight outfit Rio Ave in September 2024 as the club’s new marketing manager. However, he began to be bombarded with calls and messages by Paços supporters who asked him to come back and run for president and save them from a nightmare. The Beavers found themselves in danger of dropping down to the semi-professional third division, prompting Paulo Meneses, who brought Abreu to the club, to step down as president after 12 years at the helm. Abreu filed his candidacy on the final deadline day, and when the only other candidate – local businessman Pedro Andrade – being prevented from taking part after refusing to join until after the season, he unanimously won the presidency.
“Football is an ungrateful world where you wake up, you work hard, you go to bed knowing that you did everything in your power to do the best for the institution you represent, and even so, there’ll be someone who will say that you are rubbish who did something wrong,” stated Abreu in an exclusive Joy News interview. “Rightly so, there’s a lot of lies around you, a lot of gratitude, a lot of campaigning against you, and that’s why it’s hard to see that some people do everything to diminish you. These past few six months, I’ve developed a lot of gray in my beard that I didn’t have before, so in 2027, when my two-year term finishes, it’ll be all white.”
“This is the first time I’ve prepared for a similar role. It’s not easy, and it gets even harder with all the difficulties, because everyone brings you problems and almost no one brings you solutions. When you manage a marketing department, your scope of action is much smaller and you often end up not being able to do things because your superiors say it’s not possible, and that’s it. Now, with the position I’m in today, I can’t shift the blame onto anybody; what goes well is my responsibility, but what goes wrong is also my responsibility. Fortunately, here at the club, people have tried to help me, and management has tried to help me with these tasks, but it is very demanding. It’s something that, no matter how much you study, no matter how much you prepare for a role like this, taking on a club as big as Paços, in the state it’s in, is a very complicated challenge.”
Paços managed to stave off the drop by the narrowest of margins, losing 2-1 to Belenenses in the promotion/relegation playoffs before winning 1-0 at home thanks to a penalty goal from Vitorino Antunes to force extra time, where they prevailed 2-1 thanks to a goal from Vladislav Morozov to secure their spot in the Portuguese second tier. But rather than splurge in the summer transfer window, Abreu opted for a more conservative approach; according to Transfermarkt, they signed 13 new players for a combined €0, in addition to selling Ivan Pavlic to Belgian champions Union Saint-Gilloise for €250,000 and allowing a host of other players to depart on loans or free transfers.
“If things were to happen for Paços to challenge to go up, we would of course fight for promotion, we wouldn’t lose games on purpose to avoid promotion. But the truth is, the squad wasn’t built to fight for promotion, and we didn’t place that responsibility on the players. That’s not what was asked of the players or the coaching staff. Obviously, we’ve seen some more humble projects in recent years that have gone to the first division without a big investment, but the truth is this: if my team starts winning now, this positive wave will end up pushing us into a possible fight to go up, and we will do everything to go up. But that’s strictly theoretical. The truth is that we’re far from that, because we’re competing against teams with budgets two, three, and even four times larger than ours.”
“Money doesn’t score goals, but it helps us choose the energy that puts the ball in the net and helps us win points, and therefore, Paços tried to restructure himself from an organizational, financial and sporting point of view, to create the conditions so that, in the next season or two seasons from now, it can effectively take on and develop a project for promotion.
We opted to be a little more conservative at this stage to reorganize things, try our best to not spend what we don’t have, and create the foundations for the person who comes afterwards to have a little more slack and a little more capacity to get into the swing of things. This negative moment sometimes takes away a lot of our lucidity, because every day there are problems, problems, problems, problems. It’s hard to think of new things when you’re constantly being bombarded with problems from the past and having to solve problems from the past. But as I was saying, that’s the goal: to create a more solid base so that I or whoever comes next in 2027 can design a project to promote the club, both in financial terms and in terms of winning games.”
Similarly to many other Portugueses like Jose Mourinho and Renato Paiva, Abreu is proof that you don’t need to be a great footballer in order to make a name for yourself in football. And after previously serving in a number of different positions, he’s now working in Paços’ most important one: president. Paços occupy the relegation playoff spot after taking just five points from their first seven matches, and they’ll be looking to pick up their first league win at home as they host Portimonense on Saturday.
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