Carlos Resende will coach FC Porto in 2023/24
For the second time as a coach and the fourth in his entire career, Carlos Resende will represent FC Porto. The coach signed a one-year contract, and the contract that links him to the four-time national champion includes two optional seasons. For many, the best Portuguese handball player in history and known as “Mister Andebol”, the 52-year-old coach will try to lead the “champions” to their fifth championship.
Resende will replace Swedish coach Magnus Anderson after five successful season.
Born in Lisbon, Carlos Resende made his first shots at the Ateneu, in the capital, even before reaching the first decade of life. Limited to the minis and children’s levels, the club limited the young athlete, who after four years of training, temporarily abandoned the modality to dedicate himself to athletics, having also started playing football until, under the influence of former colleagues and friends, he decided join Sporting’s fundraising.
The talent did not go unnoticed and the club kept him indoors for four seasons, in which he played as a starter and youth player. At the age of 17, he was the protagonist of a media transfer to the club that he and his family loved: FC Porto. In an interview with the Federation, he explained even later: “I was extremely satisfied because both me and my family have a taste for FC Porto and I remember an episode in which I was watching the Champions League final with my father and, at the time, it was said that FC Porto had signed a lot of outstanding handball players, like José Luzia, João Santa Bárbara, players that I idolized. And, as a joke, I said to my father “one day I’ll come” and the truth is that it happened.
At Invicta, he shot towards stardom. While still a minor, he made his debut in the national youth and junior teams and even in the main team, in which he would become a key player in the historical records reached in 2002. a tremendous national junior title, a Portuguese Cup and a Super Cup, but the goal of becoming national champion did not become a reality, as a result of the power of ABC at the time, a club to which he would change due to the influence of Alexander Donner, national coach who accumulated the position of helmsman of Braga.
With the responsibility of joining a club that had reached the highest point in its history by playing in the Champions League final, the then left-back did not disappoint. In the six years he wore yellow, he not only helped ABC to become four times national champion (there were five titles in total between 1994 and 2000), to reach the “tri” in the Portuguese Cup (4 titles in the same period) and winning two super cups, as well as being the top scorer in the Champions League in 1995/96 and 1996/97.
The return to Dragão had nothing to do with the first passage. Resende arrived shortly after being a leading figure in the historic journey of the national team towards seventh place in the 2000 European Championship, the best ranking ever until 2020. In Croatia, the Porto player was considered the best left back in the competition. Back to national reality, he contradicted the premonitions of the ABC directors by immediately winning a Super Cup precisely against the old team and by becoming national champion the following year. After six years in which he enjoyed and made fans rave, he ended his playing career and immediately began sharing the immense knowledge acquired from the world’s biggest stages.
The new stage (2006/07) started right away with the conquest of the Portuguese Cup, against Benfica, but the championship would have the unwanted outcome, when it was left to ABC. 2007/08 only brought one League Cup (23-18 against Sporting), but the much-desired title of national champion would not escape for much longer. In the season that followed, the blue and whites defeated Benfica, who were defending their status as winners in the previous edition, by 3-2 in the final and regained the maximum scepter of the sport at national level, starting the famous cycle of the seven-time championship. The coach said goodbye again and headed to Braga for the home where he shone as a player.
In another half dozen years at ABC, he returned the Minho team to the highest place on the podium in 2015/16, the year in which he also led them to win the Challenge Cup, before returning to Lisbon in 2017. In three years at Benfica, won a Portuguese Cup and a Super Cup. Once again traveling to the North, he accepted the project presented by Gaia, where he developed talents and won two eighth places in Handball 1.
