It’s not often that a football journalist becomes a football coach at the highest level.
Mariana Cabral was just one month shy of 12 years working for Expresso, the biggest newspaper in Portugal, when she made a decision she’d been thinking about for some time.
In June, she was announced as the new head coach of Sporting CP’s women’s team. In August, her team defeated reigning champions Benfica to win the Super Cup and when the league's Championship round begins in December, they will go into it after an unbeaten first stage that saw them defeat Benfica again.
Speaking to GOAL, Cabral describes the job as "a dream come true", that dream having started a long time ago, even before she began working within the youth teams at Sporting back in 2016, when its women’s team relaunched.
Before that, she'd held a variety of coaching roles around Portugal after hanging up her own boots in her mid-20s, having represented former Portuguese champions Dezembro in the Women’s Champions League.
Juggling all of this with her every day job was certainly demanding, but it had huge benefits.
“I got to interview hundreds of great coaches from all over the world,” Cabral explains.
Isabel Silva“I tried to learn from all of them. The most impactful interviews I had, and feelings I had, were when the U.S. women’s national team came here to the Algarve Cup and sometimes we could watch their training sessions or talk to the players. It was just another world.
“The intensity they brought in the training session, they are very into it. They're very competitive. They have that drive that is spectacular.
"That's always been very close to my heart because I have a lot of family in the United States, so before I even knew that women’s football existed in Portugal, I knew that women's football existed in America, because I used to go there when I was a child.
“It was impactful for me also when I interviewed [new England head coach] Sarina Wiegman. She said something that I totally agree with: women's football is still in the very early stages of development, and she prefers to win 4-2, 4-3, or 5-3 than play for a 1-0 victory.
“We have to put on a show. We have to make people enjoy this team because, otherwise, why would they see us? We're still growing.
“I think that’s really important to strive for the beautiful game. I think that's sort of our philosophy here [at Sporting] as well because we want to win, but we want to put on a good show to our supporters and to the people in general to try to make women’s football even greater.”
Isabel Silva/GoalWhile journalism helped give Cabral some priceless experiences, the balancing act with her coaching became “very difficult” and, eventually, she'd choose between the two.
“When I really thought about it, what was my drive? My drive was going to training, being with my players, thinking about our games, watching our games, analysing them,” she explains.
“How can we get better? How can this player get better? What do we need to develop? What does she need? What do we need in general to get better? What do our youth teams need to get better?
"I would say like 90 per cent of my day was thinking about those things so I guess it was a pretty obvious choice that at some stage… It was growing, growing, growing. I had to do it.
“In the past year, I was really thinking about that and I had decided that I was going to be a coach, 100%. Even if this offer [from Sporting] had not come, I wanted to do it some way. I had other offers, but Sporting was just perfect.”
Slowly, Cabral started dropping hints of the switch into conversation with her mother “a long time” before she would make it for good.
“I already knew that she would be like: ‘Oh my god, no, that's ridiculous. You have a steady job. You have a great job at the best newspaper. Don't do that. You never know, football is crazy. You get fired!’ But once she started talking to the people around her, the idea grew on her," she recalls.
José Lorvão“My dad is also a big football fan, he supported me. All of my family supported me, actually. It’s good to have their support because I’m in Lisbon. They’re all [at home, in the Azores]. It's like a two-hour flight. I don't have my family here so, of course, it's very important to me to feel their support.”
There is also big support from the club. The first of Portugal’s ‘big three’ to invest in women’s football, Sporting are looking to take the league title back from Benfica this year, having seen Braga win it the year before as well.
The change from a focus on developing young players – which remains important, nonetheless, at a club that produced Cristiano Ronaldo and Luis Figo – to results-based demands is the biggest difference from Cabral’s past experience within the youth ranks.
But, as the results show, she’s taking it in her stride so far.
“It's how much you hate losing that makes you win more, or less,” she says. “That's the kind of thing we're trying to grow here.”