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West Bromwich Albion had heard the warnings over Matheus Pereira but they decided to take a chance.
When researching their potential summer signing they had been told that Pereira could be high-maintenance, but Slaven Bilic had seen and heard enough of Pereira’s match-winning potential that taking him on loan became, in the eyes of the Croatian and his advisers, a no-brainer.
Their calculated gamble has paid off handsomely with Pereira, the 23-year-old Brazilian, emerging as the key creative force in Albion’s rise to the top of the Championship as the season approaches the halfway point.
And at some stage in the next few months, possibly as early as January, the Sporting Lisbon loanee will become a permanent Albion player in a deal worth just £9 million.
Given his thrilling performances in 18 games so far for the club, the cost of the pending transfer is puzzlingly low; so much so that fans, pundits and even some inside the club are wondering whether there must be a catch.
Maybe there is none. But if there is a reason why Sporting were ready to sanction such a low-cost deal for such a talented performer then perhaps the reputation Pereira earned, rightly or wrongly, at the end of his spell in Lisbon is it.
“He has a positive obsession with football,” Michael Koellner, Pereira’s coach at German side Nurnberg, told The Athletic. “And if anything goes against his ideas, he gets angry.
“That is why he is not a pleasant player for many coaches, because he doesn’t hide his anger.”

Albion have suffered more than their share of Twitter grief in recent years, from Peter Odemwingie’s angry rants at his treatment by the club to Saido Berahino’s tirade at former chairman Jeremy Peace.
So if Pereira maintains the form that has made him the Championship’s most talked-about player so far this season, there will be wry smiles at The Hawthorns at the social media site repaying a little of its debt.
If a single moment cast the die on Sporting’s negative opinion of the player, it was one tweet in August 2018.
“Some things are impossible to understand,” wrote Pereira after being left out of Sporting’s match-day squad for the opening game of the season. “I’ll just have to cheer from the stands.”
With that, Pereira burned his bridges with Jose Peseiro, the then Sporting coach, and confirmed his reputation in some quarters of the Portuguese capital as petulant. He was farmed out on loan to Nuremberg and there was no way back for him at Sporting.
Pereira had helped Chaves finish sixth in the Portuguese league in 2017-18 and, by common consent, enjoyed an impressive pre-season for Sporting. But he found himself omitted from the match-day squad for that match against Moreirense and his anger boiled over onto Twitter.
His relationship with Peseiro and, by extension, the wider Sporting hierarchy was damaged beyond repair and with Sporting’s golden boy, Bruno Fernandes, starring in the first team in Pereira’s position, his prospects of first-team football appeared bleak.
Peseiro had returned for a second spell in charge of Sporting just a month earlier and he was sacked by November, but his brief spell in charge proved long enough to leave Pereira out in the cold.
“It’s good that he’s annoyed,” said Peseiro at the time. “But I’m not so pleased that he’s saying it on social media.
“We have a lot of talented players. The coach’s job is to teach them to show that on the pitch, with commitment and responsibility. Being a reserve is about being ready to come into the side with determination, with a desire to help. Players who don’t have that mindset will be left out. That applies to him or any other player. I don’t want to focus on individual cases. Matheus has a lot of potential.
“He’s a ‘bet’ for the future. The challenge is for him to become a starter for Sporting. Sometimes the players think we’re annoying, but that’s our job. He has to be ready to make a difference off the bench.”
Peseiro publicly left a route open for Pereira to return to Sporting, but privately the friction between the men meant things had gone too far.
“I’m focused on Nurnberg and having success here,” said Pereira in a December 2018 interview with Noticias ao Minuto. “When I return to Portugal, you can expect to see a warrior who is ready to be a champion and win things.
“At no point did he (Peseiro) give me any feedback. There was nothing. He just didn’t give me opportunities and left me out of the squad. He never gave me an explanation, told me how to improve, or what I needed to do to become an option for him.
“It’s tough when you show you’re capable and the coach still doesn’t believe in you. But I’m trying to get over it with hard work, dedication and tranquility.
“I don’t think I left with a cloud over me because of that tweet. I think Jose Peseiro turned the fans against me with his words. What he said about me isn’t true at all.”
The reasons for the tension are understood by regulars at Sporting. The decision to sanction such a cut-price transfer away from Lisbon are not.
Diogo Pombo, of the Expresso newspaper, described the £9 million deal as “incredible”.
“That (2018 tweet) was a moment of real instability at Sporting,” he told The Athletic. “In May, fans had invaded the training ground, and they had a new coach in Peseiro. Matheus stood out during pre-season, but wasn’t called up for the first game of the season and sent that tweet.
“Matheus Pereira is a case that exemplifies the recent management of Sporting. He’s a player who was identified as a real talent, with huge potential, at a young age. But he has never been given a chance by any coach, and has never had a proper run in the side. Over time, he has gained a reputation as a problem player, and this is now his third loan spell in the last three seasons.
“But it’s fair to say that he has never before played as well as he is playing at West Brom now. He impressed at Chaves two years ago but that’s a different level of football.”

At Nurnberg, Pereira made important strides in his development. He arrived with the Twitter cloud hanging over him and with a reputation to rebuild. He left as the Bundesliga’s “rookie of the year” despite his adopted side being relegated from the top tier.
And Koellner, who lost his own job before the end of the season, enjoyed a fruitful union with his on-loan star while getting an insight into the man behind the rumours.
“Matheus is a person who can possibly rub someone up the wrong way, but I never had any problems with him,” Koellner told The Athletic. “A good relationship with my players is very important to me.
“He is a guy who wants to play football and wants to be able to connect as quickly as possible. It is important for him to see that certain measures or behaviours are beneficial to his football game.
“He is a sociable guy but surely, it’s a little difficult when you have a language barrier. Much of a person’s humour or personality is lost if one cannot express oneself properly. But we had a good translator. Matheus is a street footballer who wants to play football all day long.
“I didn’t have any problems with him, as I already said. He wants to feel understood and I always try to put myself in the player’s place in order to understand him. He is also a bit of a free spirit on the pitch, who has his own ideas. You have to discuss these ideas with the player. This is the only way to integrate his strengths into the game. Often the problem in football is that coaches want to shape a player the way they need him. But I think you have to focus on the player’s strengths and adapt your game to him.
“We did that in Nuremberg. And I always try to make it clear to a player what role he plays in the team, what role he plays for me and what is important for his career.”
It was while in Germany that Pereira made another giant leap that would help prepare him for life in the Championship. If his temperament was one concern for Sporting, then a lack of consistency had apparently been another. So, too, were weaknesses in his defensive game that had left coaches reluctant to trust him in their starting XI.
As Albion fans will testify, this season at The Hawthorns has thrown up no such frailties with Pereira mucking in to help his new side press opponents. For that, they have Nurnberg to thank.
“I was actually surprised,” recalls Koellner. “In the first weeks he had big problems to work defensively. I still remember his first game against Werder Bremen. With his own possession of the ball, he had shown a few times how strong he is on the ball. He held his own in the tightest of spaces against three or four Werder Bremen players. But defensively he lacked the attitude and the connection to the game. Defence is essential in the Bundesliga.
“That was a little surprising for us because he came from a professional league. But it was clear to us that a player who came to Nuremberg had not yet mastered everything, otherwise he would have prevailed at another club. It was clear before that we had to work hard on a few things with him in training.
“Matheus was offered to us by a consultant who also worked with our player, Ewerton. After this offer we did some research about Matheus, watched a lot of video sequences and one match and we got some information from his consultant and from our sports director, Andreas Bornemann. I knew we needed an offensively strong player and it was obvious that Matheus had extraordinary skills on the ball.
“In the beginning, I think it was quite difficult for him to adapt to German football. The Bundesliga is about being physically strong, switching quickly from offence to defence or from defence to offence, being compact. All eleven players have to take part in the defence.
“He worked hard on that and improved. At the beginning he had to be put into physical condition, because apart from the attitude, the physical conditions are also part of the defensive game. He learned both in Nuremberg. That is why Nuremberg was a great time for him.”

At Chaves, where Pereira had thrived the season before with seven goals and five assists in 27 appearances, attention was paid to his defensive deficiencies.
Yet according to at least one team-mate, there was no sign of the problematic character that would be spoken of by Peseiro later.
“That’s not the Matheus I knew,” defender Hugo Basto told The Athletic. “Jose Peseiro must have had his reasons for saying that, which I respect, but from what I saw of Matheus, I couldn’t point to any issues.
“I have not worked with many players with Matheus’s potential. He’s a fast player who strikes the ball well, but what really impressed me was his technique. He made difficult things look easy.
“Away from the field, Matheus is a calm guy. He usually keeps to himself — that’s his style — but he will have a joke or a chat with you if you speak to him. He’s also very close with his family.
“Defensively, he had a few things to work on. It’s not that he couldn’t defend, but maybe he could have been more committed at certain moments. He’s a player who loves to make the difference in attack, and I think that makes it difficult for him to track back.
“Matheus won the Chaves fans over. We had a great season and Matheus contributed a lot to that success with lots of goals and assists. He was really loved and cherished.”

If there is an edge to Pereira’s personality as previous coaches believe, then Albion have yet to see it manifest itself negatively. Instead, the 23-year-old’s intensity for football and self-improvement has been shown in a tunnel-visioned determination for any small gain he can achieve.
He has been seen regularly at the training ground on days off, doing extra work in the gym to ensure the rigours of the Championship do not catch up with him.
He and Filip Krovinovic, a loanee from Sporting’s cross-city rivals Benfica but a player with whom Pereira has formed a close bond, can also be seen on treadmills or lifting weights long after Albion’s official training sessions have ended.
As Albion fans will testify, Pereira is not a stereotypical Brazilian No 10. He is blessed with a toughness that was forged on the streets of Belo Horizonte, where he first played the game with friends.
His talent was first taken seriously when, after a childhood illness left him hospitalised, Pereira’s father watched his convalescing son dribbling a ball around the ward — and breaking a window. He received his first pair of football boots shortly afterwards and, as the son of a well-off Brazilian family, his prospects looked good until a crash for the nation’s economy forced a mass relocation to Portugal.
His father began selling satellite dishes to fund his children’s ambitions and his mother took cleaning jobs, but their son’s talent shone through and caught the eye of Sporting. He joined the club as a child and remains contracted to the club, but this summer made it clear his time at Sporting was coming to an end.
By the time he returned from Nurnberg, Peseiro had moved on but the effects of his fallout with Pereira meant the player could not shake off his unwanted reputation. Sporting were keen to move him on and, in Bilic, they found a willing buyer.
The Albion boss’s advisers had been impressed with Pereira at Chaves and in his handful of appearances for Sporting. Bilic turned to WyScout, the widely-used video scouting network, and he and his coaches watched a series of Pereira’s performances for Nurnberg. They were struck not just by his attacking flair, but also by his hunger and energy in a team that, all too often, suffered setbacks.
Bilic made it clear that he wanted the player and eventually Albion did a deal, but only after insuring themselves against the reputation that their due diligence on Pereira had thrown up.
Sporting wanted the season-long loan to be followed by a straightforward obligation to buy. Albion instead negotiated a permanent deal that would be activated if they were promoted or if Pereira appeared 32 times in the Championship. Crucially, they also included a clause that meant they could activate the transfer at any stage, too.
They are now content to do so, confident that even if their impressive start does not translate into promotion, they could manage Pereira’s wages for at least another Championship season and sell him on at a profit.
So far he has 10 league assists; two more than the Championship’s next best (Bristol City’s Niclas Eliasson) to add to his five goals, while his tally of 10 big chances created, defined by Opta as a chance that the receiving player should be expected to score, is second only to his West Brom team-mate Matt Phillips, who has 11.
Opta data suggests Pereira and his team-mates are getting the most from his talent, too. His expected goals, the number of goals he would be expected to score based on the quality of his chances, stands at just 2.82 compared to his actual goals total of five. Yet Albion fans and team-mates are unlikely to care if Pereira’s output continues to outperform his theoretical performance levels.
Perhaps more importantly, he has done it all while becoming a hugely popular figure in the Albion camp.
Hawthorns staff have seen nothing of the stroppy character others had described. Instead, they report a happy-go-lucky footballer enjoying life in Birmingham with his childhood sweetheart, who studied at Leicester University and has returned to England with him.
Indeed, one insider joked last week that he would happily take Pereira home to his family every evening. He had heard the rumours that Pereira was a troublemaker. Yet he had seen no evidence to support the claims and, in any case, Bilic was a ‘world champion’ of man-management, better placed than most to keep the player pulling in the right direction.
“He’s brilliant,” confirmed Kyle Bartley, the defender and member of Albion’s senior leadership group. “He’s always got a smile on his face and he loves his football. He worked probably harder than anyone on the pitch and off the pitch with his recovery and looking after his body. So any success he gets is fully deserved.
“He’s a special talent. It’s important that he continues working hard and it’s up to us to look after him and keep him going. He must have a little bit of English in him because I’ve never seen a Brazilian work as hard as him. He’s got all the ability in the world but the most impressive part is how hard he works and puts in for the team.”
“He’s a joke, isn’t he,” smiled Semi Ajayi, Bartley’s defensive partner. “It’s a joy to play with him but I can imagine it’s an even bigger joy to watch him.”
“If you like football, then you like Matheus,” added Kieran Gibbs. “It really is as simple as that.”
Brilliant read. Enjoy him while you can as I don't think he'll be here for too long.
Good read that. He seems genuinely happy here for the time being. Would be good to get a season with him in the PL before he moves on to bigger and better things.
A truly class act. I don't know why we should be so downbeat about keeping him however. If he's happy at the club with a manager who knows how to manage him he's also smart enough to realise it could be very different moving one and the situation being quite different where he ends up. Sure he may not stay but I'd like to think if we get promoted we could have at least a couple of seasons out of him. Of course his agents will have other ideas.
There's a terrible tendency for fans in general never to enjoy the present and look forward to worse times.
At the minute we have this unbelievable player who looks like he will join permanently. Also we are running away, along with Leeds, to automatic promotion, whilst scoring goals galore and playing the best football here for over 10 years at least.
In all likelihood Pereira will sign, stay for a year, hopefully helping us to promotion and safety next season, and then we will probably make about a £30m profit on him and he will have created memories as the modern day Laurie, who went onto better things himself.
So let's not worry about this, and situations like the Ferguson and Diangana ones. Even if the latter situations transpire negatively we have so much going for us this year we can overcome them.
It's hard to recall a Christmas when as Albion fans we have so much to be thankful of.
Pereira today rather than any thoughts of no Pereira tomorrow, for me.
Great read. Just reiterating how good of a man manager Slav is. Seems every other manager says he can be trouble, doesnt do the dirty work, etc. Hes shown non of that. He digs in, and the way he celebrates team goals shows just how happy he is here. Good time to be a Baggie. Who would have thought it when we lost that shoot out against Greasy Jack and co. 6 months is a long time in Football.
Loosing to Vile really is fast becoming a blessing in disguise imvho.
He's just posted this very heartwarming tweet: https://twitter.com/MatheusPereira/statu...5529105409
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