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Deutsch Wolf said:
Kilman (deal actually set to expire in June...we probably have an option though) and Saiss (summer 2021) are the next two that need sorting.

All the young kids will have an option as standard - I would think this would include Cameron John. I expect Ruddy to go when his deal runs out in June, obviously Graham, German Phil, Bright, Rodders and Benno have no future here anyway, they're all up either this year (the first two) or next.
Click to expand...

Nuno is the next one that needs sorting
 
Trips said:
Nuno is the next one that needs sorting
Click to expand...

Well, kind of.

It doesn't really protect us if he has a deal running to 2031 rather than 2021, it wouldn't impact particularly on how we'd be recompensed (which wouldn't be enough, whatever it is). And managers routinely just leave when they want even if they're under contract, which players can't.

I'd be rather miffed if we did nothing about Saiss and in 10 months he announced he'd be off to some La Liga team for free. Not that I think we will mess about with it.
 
According to the commentators on last nights game, Willy Boly's contract is up soon. That's one player I wouldn't like to lose shortly.
 
Yeah they said that but I don't think it's true. I think they've mixed him up with Saiss.

We didn't disclose the length of his deal when we signed him (don't know why, we didn't with Jota either) but it will have been at least four years, so he's here until at least 2022.
 
Deutsch Wolf said:
Yeah they said that but I don't think it's true. I think they've mixed him up with Saiss.

We didn't disclose the length of his deal when we signed him (don't know why, we didn't with Jota either) but it will have been at least four years, so he's here until at least 2022.
Click to expand...

Good. Hopefully you're right, although we need to keep Saiss happy too.
 
Looks ike there's a good article on Nuno and his philosophy in the Telegraph, but you need to register with them. Can anyone already registered do a cut & paste?
 
Code: 
 Nuno Espirito Santo interview: Wolves manager on the secrets of building a winning side and his footballing philosophy
The 46-year-old veteran of Jose Mourinho’s great, early 2000s Porto side discusses his life, and future plans at Wolves
By
Sam Wallace,
 CHIEF FOOTBALL WRITER
29 February 2020 • 10:30pm
Premium
Wolves operate one of the smallest squads in the league, with just 18 core players, and Nuno believes in the future he may need fewer.

Get unlimited access to award-winning sports journalism from The Telegraph - Sports Newspaper of the Year - for just £40 per annum
A simple idea that inverts an old convention in football, and as Nuno Espirito Santo explains it in a meeting room at Wolverhampton Wanderers’ training ground this week, it makes you wonder how many other managers might consider adopting it.

Nuno, as everyone calls him, does not fine his players for being late for training. The Wolves manager does not see the point. “Money, for a footballer, is not an issue,” he says, and suggests a hypothetical situation. “You have a big star, he comes five minutes late and I say, ‘OK, I’m going to fine you £5,000’ and he goes, ‘Tomorrow, I’ll come 10 minutes late, and the day after I’ll come 15. Are you going to fine me?’ ”

Instead, Nuno, based on 30 years in the game as a goalkeeper and latterly a manager, has a different approach: everyone waits. “Waiting, waiting, waiting,” he says. “F------ freezing, waiting. When the guy comes, nobody claps. I ask, ‘OK, are you ready to work? We’ve been waiting for you. We start now that you are here’. It works. No argument, no conflict. Nothing.”

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Nuno says no one is late anymore. “Never,” he says. “I can assure you”. And for a moment he smiles, reflecting on the curious nature of the game that he has played, observed and coached since he grew up as a child on the west African island of Sao Tome.

The 46-year-old veteran of Jose Mourinho’s great, early 2000s Porto side, a club he himself managed before Wolves, has agreed to a rare audience to discuss his life, and over two hours a very different man emerges. This is Nuno away from the grind of post-match interviews when he often seems to be answering through gritted teeth, with the embattled look of a storm-tossed, trawler skipper. Wolves are one of the great Premier League success stories, into the Europa League last 16, and much of that has to do with their Portuguese coach.

Wolves booked their place in the last 16 of the Europa League on Thursday night

Wolves play Mourinho’s Tottenham Hotspur on Sunday, an association with an old boss that often tends to define Nuno, although there is much more to him than that. During the conversation it turns out he can speak Russian, the consequence of 18 months with Dynamo Moscow. He tells us how Jorge Mendes, the super agent, got his first break by driving three hours to intercept the president of Deportivo La Coruna outside his favourite restaurant – just to persuade him to buy Nuno. He explains his coaching philosophy and his dream of a “non-conflict environment”.

“All my life I lived in an environment of conflict,” he reflects, “I’m a survivor by nature”. A surprise, it is pointed out, given that press conferences can often feel like the prelude to a conflict. “Now I’m feeling relaxed,” Nuno says, “but you have to realise, us managers, when we go to press conferences, we know if the game was good or bad, and what’s going to come. If you are frustrated or angry it’s not easy sometimes to be confronted with these stupid questions that don’t make sense at all.” He pauses for a moment for the laughter in the room. “It’s true!” he says.

If one were to describe his approach it would be a striving to challenge the orthodoxies of the game that he spent his life observing – mostly from the bench. He was a reserve goalkeeper for much of his club career and all his brief time as an unused member of Portugal squads. He knows what it is like not to play, and how the different agendas and personalities in a squad can bring them down or drive them on.

 
Wolves operate one of the smallest squads in the league, with just 18 core players, and Nuno believes in the future he may need fewer. “When you look at the statistics of different teams, no matter which countries, you see the highest number is around 14 or 15 players used. And it doesn’t change. So what is that telling you? Let’s have a strong investment in preventing injuries but at the same time you don’t have to worry, because all the players are involved.”

This is the key for Nuno – a club where no player goes into a tactics meeting or steps on to a team bus knowing there is no prospect of him playing a part in a game. In his day, Nuno says, players were left out with what he says was no more than “a s--- conversation, a hand on the head, a clap on the shoulder”. He estimates he played no more than 50 per cent of the games his teams were involved in but players are different now – they want the reasons for decisions. “It’s not that we were dumb, my generation. We just didn’t spend so much time involved in the game and around the game. I feel now the players are more around the game and they understand.”

Nuno left just one player – Jonny – behind for the trip to Espanyol in Spain for the second leg of the round-of-32 Europa League tie that Wolves won 6-3 on aggregate. “If I had four or five players off, I would only see them again [on] Friday,” Nuno says. “So it would be Wednesday, Thursday, without any contact. Even if a member of staff stays here, when you regroup, those [left behind] are totally different psychologically, physically, in humour, dynamic. So there is a clash … you get the players that were not involved in the game plus the players that stayed here. Problems.”

In Nuno’s experience it is not just about the grievances of a player on the fringe, it can even be a case of two who are best friends “and one”, he says, “starts suffering for the other who is left out”. He adds: “The training sessions of the players that are not involved in games are the worst ones, and the more dangerous ones because this is where the s--- happens.” What does he mean by more dangerous? “Conflict”, he replies.

He says he was “no angel” as a player but did his best to be a good team-mate. He would volunteer to stand in for the strikers’ finishing practice to take the burden off the first-choice goalkeeper. At Porto he helped talk teen prodigy Ricardo Quaresma out of conspiracy theories he developed that certain team-mates refused to pass him the ball. “As a boy he was living in constant conflict.” Nuno, the reserve goalkeeper who observed everything, resolved to be different. “We cooperate to compete” is his mantra.

“It’s such a tiny, fine margin,” he says. “A tweet or post of a player can really harm you. Something that is so simple. If you allow these things to happen, even live in the fear that they might happen, you are f-----. You are f-----. So I try everything the other way around. And work on basic things, on simple things that were our life before. Like a family, no?”

Nuno’s family were a “powerful” one in Sao Tome, off the coast of Guinea. His parents had to move to Portugal after independence was declared but the memories of his life there up to the age of seven are vivid. He talks about the island’s rush hour when his grandmother would order him to stop playing football in the street. “Five cars,” he said, “and that was the traffic over.”

“I can tell you what I felt. Freedom. No danger. Skin. The touch of the skin. We were very physical because you almost walk around in the streets naked. The need of contact is something I still feel that I need. The weather, of course. It was one road and then the beach. Three houses away was my grandmother, four houses was my uncle. In the street there were no cars. If you wanted to play football with a guy that lived six houses away you just shouted to him. And you played on the beach, in the road.”

Nuno's achievements at Wolves will likely lead to other opportunities although he is by no means in a rush.

As a goalkeeper he played in Spain and Portugal for seven clubs, as well as the Moscow stint, and his move from Vitoria Guimaraes to Deportivo in 1997 was also significant for a young nightclub owner who wanted a break in the football agent world. That was a 31-year-old Mendes, whose GestiFute company now represents some of the game’s biggest stars, including Cristiano Ronaldo and Mourinho, but back then would drive three hours for a 10-minute chat with the Deportivo president, Augusto Cesar Lendoiro.

“The president had dinner in the same restaurant so Jorge would go from my house, every night, to speak with him,” Nuno says. “Sometimes he came back to give me feedback. Jorge owned a nightclub. I think the first time I met him was there. A friend of mine said, ‘I think you’re good, I’m going to introduce you to someone who can help you’. Jorge was also starting. I was one of the first clients and the big one, who earned him money to pay his licence, was me.”

The peak of his playing career was at the Porto team Mourinho built, winning the Uefa Cup in 2003 and the Champions League the year after. It made Mourinho’s name, although the effect was less spectacular for Nuno, an unused substitute in both finals. What he remembers most was the spirit, a team who would go to lunch after training together every day rather than return home.

“Mourinho was not there, but he knew we had lunch. Sometimes at the club dinner [in the evening] everybody was only eating soup because at lunch we ate everything. We were full. That’s why he [Mourinho] is so good – because he read it and he saw it was something that the players had together. He didn’t mess with it.

“The lunches were productive. It was almost like we were building bonds of commitment to what was coming next. I remember every conversation would finish with the game, what we were going to do. Like, ‘Ah, are you going to score?’ ‘I bet you don’t score’. That sort of thing. That’s why I think it is all about [team spirit]. When special people meet and they gel, you have something special. It’s up to you to manage and make decisions but the beginning is that.”

He took his coaching badges in the Scottish seaside town of Largs, as Mourinho had done years before, and led Rio Ave to two cup finals in his first job. At Valencia he had a fourth-place finish in the league, at Porto, where he was deemed less successful, a second place. His achievements at Wolves will likely lead to other opportunities although he is by no means in a rush. His son is now studying in Manchester. He goes back to Portugal when he can from his home near Wolves’ training ground in the Compton area of the city.

He knows that he cannot hide his emotions and it impacts those around him. “They know when I’m not good. I’m silent.” He mimes a look of anguish. “I look at people and think, ‘This guy feels that I’m really p----d off’. I am.” He is fiercely driven and has a clear idea of what he wants, that being the perfect harmonious football environment. And after that career is over, a life like the one he grew up with, where there was no conflict at all. “I’m looking forward to living like that again. When I stop I want to live the same patterns. With freedom, with simple things. One switch turns one light off and that’s it.”
 
Similar, but better article in the Times. I’ve got no free articles left, so someone else will need to c+p
 
611a70bc5745a700c750fd889ff1d4f5.jpg

From the Times. This would be great.
 
Well at times with the 343 starting formation we've come close. Coady steps up and the wing backs bomb on, and we've virtually been a 235.
 
Isn't that pretty much the formation of the great Cullis teams?
 
Is that Nuno saying he'd like to go to 2-3-3-2?

That would be interesting. Boly and Saiss at the back. Coady further forward between Doc and Jonny. Neves and Moutinho and one other behind Jimenez and Jota. Given that Nuno is prepared to invest six months or more into a player's development, I do wonder if a system like would allow Podence to play as a #10 behind the front two.
 
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