Hugo Viana (left) will become Manchester City’s director of football this summer

“Ten million euros is a lot of money – are you sure about that?” he asked Sporting president Frederico Varandas.
It was March 2020, and Sporting director of football Viana was referring to untested manager Ruben Amorim’s Braga buyout clause.
Varandas had no doubts whatsoever. And neither did Viana, who will replace Txiki Begiristain as Manchester City’s director of football next season.
Viana thought it was his job to raise the question though, considering Amorim’s lack of managerial experience in senior football. The decision, however, was already made.

“The only person from the club who was aligned with me was Viana,” Varandas would later admit.
Viana, in fact, was the mastermind behind the idea, having thought about bringing Amorim to Sporting months before, but initially to their B side.
Ultimately, it proved to be a career-defining move that has drastically changed the fortunes of a team that had been constantly at war with itself and gone almost two decades without a league title.
They have since won it twice, developed an outstanding scouting network and finished three consecutive financial years with a profit for the first time ever, reporting a record revenue of 246.7m euros in the last term, largely thanks to the sales of players like Manuel Ugarte and Pedro Porro.
That all helps explain why Manchester City have decided to make Viana the successor to Begiristain, who will leave the four-times-in-a-row English champions at the end of the season.

It may have come as a surprise to some, but definitely not to anyone at Sporting.
“Viana has proved, over and over, that he can do magic,” Amorim said.
“We have to remember that we fight against clubs that are stronger than us financially, so we have to put much more effort, we have to present our project and show our track record in the transfer market.”
And, for most of the time, Viana has done that in silence, having been described in Portugal as ‘the shadow man’.
Despite a career that took him to two World Cups and saw him labelled as “the best young player in the planet” on his arrival at Newcastle in 2002, the 41-year-old doesn’t enjoy the spotlight anymore.
“That’s something that should be stressed because he’s well aware that it’s more important in his position to do his work behind the scenes than to be in pictures everywhere,” coach Domingos Paciencia, who first had him as a player at Braga and then later on as sporting director at Belenenses, told BBC Sport.
“That certainly won’t change at City.”