Treforest, a small town in the Welsh valleys, strikes as an unusual place for Jose Mourinho’s new No 2 to have begun his coaching education. Aside from being the birthplace to Sir Tom Jones, there is little much else to write home about.

But for Joao Sacramento, it represented the start to a pursuit of a career at the highest level. And he was unafraid to leave his comfort zone to take it.

As an 18-year-old, Sacramento moved from Portugal to Treforest to study at the University of Glamorgan — as it was named then — because its football course was one of only a few offering such bespoke tutoring in Europe.

He wasn’t there for the cosmopolitan lifestyle. One contemporary student tells The Athletic: “It’s literally the start of a valley. When I first moved there my mum said, ‘Where are we?’”

Sacramento’s progression from undergrad in south Wales to jobs at Monaco and Lille — where he was briefly caretaker manager aged 29 — and now Tottenham is a triumph for academia. He did not play the game to any level but instead committed fervently to understanding coaching methods and in that sense Mourinho, who has a history of making such appointments when you consider Andre Villas-Boas and Rui Faria, might see a reflection of himself.

Sacramento’s mother and father could not envisage their son’s trajectory at the start, however. “His parents wanted him to study something mainstream, like engineering,” says Dave Adams, who led the course at Glamorgan, now called the University of South Wales. “He was interested in coaching from a very young age. He found the course online and knew it offered qualifications and a degree in football that was very specialist. In Portugal there was no such programme available. His parents didn’t seem very keen. They wondered where he would go career-wise, which is fair enough, it was niche. But he and I managed to convince them.”

Even though he could speak French and Spanish, Sacramento’s English was actually very rudimentary when he first relocated. But he came armed with an excellent appreciation of the training methods Mourinho had brought to England to such success in his first stint at Chelsea.

‘Tactical periodisation’ is a concept pioneered by Vitor Frade at the University of Porto which essential interweaves all the elements of football. “Everything is integrated, all the disciplines of the game come together,” says Adams. “So when you are doing technical, tactical training you are also training the physical at the same time.”

John Terry has given an account of what this looked like for players. “We were of a generation that on day one of pre-season, you’d put your trainers on and run around the pitch. But from day one, (Mourinho) ordered us to put our boots on (to play with the ball),” Terry recently told Dubai Eye 103.8. “His fitness coach had the mindset of, ‘You never see a pianist running around a piano.’ From day one we were working with the ball.”

Adams, who is now technical director of the Welsh FA, adds: “During Joao’s Masters we did quite a bit of research, looking into how that methodology had been implemented into various clubs at the time. Brendan Rodgers was in at Swansea, for example, and he had worked with Mourinho at Chelsea.”

It was clear from the beginning Sacramento, now 30, meant business. “He was quite quiet but extremely studious,” says Adams. “Every single assignment he got 80 per cent plus. He was incredibly switched-on.”

A university friend remembers: “He is cut from a similar cloth to Mourinho to be honest, confident but a little bit brash. He’s a good dude, can be cheeky. His English improved loads second and third years.

“For Joao there was no other way. Even back then he said there were certain managers he couldn’t work with because of his training methods.”

Adams set up vocational modules for his students, with Sacramento one of a number who gained experience at Cardiff City academy, coaching various age groups.

“He was also very much into analysing the opposition,” adds Adams. “He was very keen to learn more about going to games and he was producing very high-end, detailed reports.”

Some of these even found their way to Gary Speed, who was managing Wales at the time. “He did a lot of work behind the scenes on the intermediate teams,” says Adams. “It was an internship, so when he was doing a masters degree full-time, he would do 20 hours a week work on top.”

Mourinho scouted opponents for Louis van Gaal at Barcelona, just as Villas-Boas then did for him at Chelsea. There is a pattern.

In June 2018, Sacramento gave a presentation at the inaugural Soccer Science Conference hosted at Bristol City, in which he provided insight into his approach. “He talked about the benefits of analysing a snapshot of the opposition’s shape or tactical disposition and then building your training sessions literally as a by-product,” says Adams, who also spoke at the conference. “You think it might be straight-forward but not many are doing it to that level of detail.”

The university friend describes Sacramento’s work in that regard as “mind-bending”. “There was only really one place Joao could have gone and that’s Champions League.”

Sacramento reached that level in April 2014 when he was named head of opposition analysis at Monaco by sporting director Luis Campos, working as an assistant to video manager Miguel Moita. It is believed Campos comes from Barcelos, the same town in Portugal as Sacramento, but there was nothing nepotistic about the appointment. Instead Sacramento gained a meeting with Campos and impressed him with a demonstration of his work on his laptop. Sacramento analysed Monaco’s opponents first for Claudio Ranieri then for Leonardo Jardim.

In January 2017 Lille OSC were bought by Gerard Lopez and one of his first acts was to appoint Campos as a sporting director. And one of Campos’ first acts was to bring Sacramento in from Monaco. He joined as first team assistant coach, with a special focus on video analysis. But when Marcelo Bielsa was appointed in May 2017, Sacramento was a victim of the power struggle between Campos and the new manager. In early September Bielsa sidelined Sacramento, relegating him away from first-team duties.

Bielsa only lasted 13 games, and in November 2017 he was suspended by the club. And Sacramento, still just 29 years old, led the four-man team that temporarily took over coaching duties. The players quickly warmed to Sacramento, finding him more amenable than Bielsa, with a less ideological style of play, and were impressed by his ability to take training in French, Spanish and Portuguese. “With Bielsa, training was very positional, it was very repetitive,” said defender Adama Soumaoro. “With Joao, there is more play, we touch the ball more.”

After losing his first game in charge, Sacramento then masterminded a 2-1 win away at Lyon, abandoning Bielsa’s style for a deeper defence and counter-attack game. “He gives us confidence, he talks to us a lot, he is always behind us,” said defender Kevin Malcuit. And when Christophe Galtier was appointed as the new permanent manager in December 2017, Sacramento was promoted to being his assistant. Clearly he made an impression in that role, as Galtier sarcastically congratulated Mourinho on his “classy” behaviour in his Thursday press conference, for taking his assistant without calling him.

Zinedine Zidane was impressed by Sacramento’s work and tried to get him as part of his staff at Real Madrid.

Evidently Mourinho, who counts Campos as a friend, was paying attention too. During his 11-month spell out of management Mourinho was frequently seen at Lille’s matches. Now they will be on the bench together at Tottenham, alongside another former Lille coach, Nuno Santos, and two of Mourinho’s team from United, the fitness coach Carlos Lalin and tactical analyst Giovanni Cerra.

Sacramento’s last job in Britain was working under Adams as technical demonstrator. And his former boss is pleased to see him thriving.

“He’s extremely ambitious and believes in himself 100 per cent,” says Adams. “He is not influenced by fads. He has always had this idea and stuck to that way of working. He is a very honest person, a good guy to have at the elite end of the game. I wish him the best of luck.”

(Photo: PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP via Getty Images)