Abel Ferreira adds name to list of foreign managers taking Brazilian football by storm

At the beginning of this season, the most admired manager in the club game set some hares out of the traps by talking about his next job.

Pep Guardiola will be at Manchester City for a while yet, though not forever and he revealed that among his ambitions for the future might be to take charge of a national team.

He shared the idea in a forum promoting a Brazilian investment group. Naturally, that invited the question: Guardiola in charge of Brazil’s Selecao, the most successful of all World Cup nations? It has been mooted before, and Guardiola specifically mentioned he would enjoy managing at a Copa America and a World Cup.

But he added he thought there would always be a barrier. “I think the coach of Brazil will always be a Brazilian,” said Guardiola, a Catalan and a citizen of Spain. “I can’t see a foreign manager in charge of a national team like Brazil.”

Not necessarily, reckons Tite, current manager of the Selecao and relatively safe in his job at least until after his second World Cup campaign with them at the end of this year. Last month, Tite was asked about Brazil’s openness to managers from abroad and he replied: “The market for coaches is about quality, knowledge and achievement, not nationality.”

The issue has become a very live one in a country that is historically proud and famously protective of its status in the sport. Yet the appetite for foreign expertise on its touchlines is growing suddenly and rapidly.

Four of the so-called G-12 clubs in Brazil - the dozen with the biggest support bases - are currently managed by non-Brazilians, an unusually high proportion. Another G-12 giant, Corinthians, are seeking a new coach and spent much of the last week in talks with the Portuguese Vitor Pereira, who was