“It’s good when someone remembers that you could be Mourinho in a skirt, right?” says Helena Costa with a smile as she talks to The Athletic on the veranda of an opulent Spanish lodge.
The nickname — coined in her and Mourinho’s homeland of Portugal greater than a decade in the past — is one piece of a globetrotting jigsaw puzzle constructed by a trailblazer.
Costa, 47, has damaged new floor for ladies in states the place their rights are restricted (Qatar and Iran), made a controversial principled stand, received a European trophy with Oliver Glasner and shattered glass ceilings at each flip.
Her newest first is changing into the only female sporting director in the men’s game worldwide.
Not that she will get carried away by these types of issues.
“It has to mean something. But for me, it’s also natural,” she says. “I don’t think it has any impact in my life, but it’s important to open doors as well.”
She pauses earlier than clarifying: “But it’s also a responsibility, because it has to work. Otherwise, it won’t open doors anyway.”
In the function for simply over a 12 months at Portuguese top-flight facet Estoril, she is talking in Malaga a day after an occasion run by TransferRoom, a web-based platform that facilitates switch offers between golf equipment. Watching Costa mingle amongst 200 to 300 friends and participate in 15-minute ‘speed-dating’ type conferences couldn’t be simpler.
Why? Because she could be very simple to identify, being one among only two ladies in the massive convention suite.
She says being in her place is a “big step” and hopes to “have changed the mindset of people”, though it shouldn’t should be this fashion. “If you’re a teacher, it doesn’t matter if you’re a woman or a man, you have to be competent and good in what you do,” she says. “Happy, too.”
The Mourinho-in-a-skirt nickname arose when Costa grew to become the first female coach of a men’s facet, taking cost of French facet Clermont Foot in 2014. “It was at a time when he was really successful,” she says. While crass and lazy, the moniker did not less than have a hyperlink to actuality at a time when her male counterpart was excelling.
Costa — who seems in a particular transfers-themed episode of The Athletic FC Podcast — began her teaching journey at Benfica’s academy in the late Nineteen Nineties, simply earlier than Mourinho took cost of the Lisbon membership’s senior staff for the first time (he rejoined them final September). Following an opportunity assembly between the pair at a pre-season pleasant in 2005, she frolicked analysing the academy setup at Chelsea throughout his first spell as supervisor there. He had opened doors, however she was the one having to show herself.
The constructing blocks of her profession got here throughout greater than a decade teaching in Benfica’s academy system, and at lower-league sides Cheleirense, Sociedade Uniao 1º Dezembro and Leixoes, the place she additionally took her first steps in recruitment. In Scotland, the place she took her UEFA A Licence (she has since reached UEFA Pro standard), she made a connection at Celtic, who took her on as one among the world’s first female scouts.
Via Qatar’s and Iran’s ladies’s groups, she was given the probability at French second-division facet Clermont Foot. FIFA’s then president Sepp Blatter and Arsenal’s supervisor at the time Arsene Wenger counseled a historic step, however it rapidly changed into a nightmare.
Within six weeks, Costa had left, falling out with the membership’s hierarchy about transfers. “I could have stayed, but I didn’t accept things that I think nobody would accept,” she remembers. “So that’s why I didn’t care if it had a world impact like it did.”
Having been put in as the first female coach of any male staff in the prime two divisions anyplace in Europe, the choice — which she calls a “moment of huge learning” — was as daring as the preliminary appointment.
“There was a crazy impact all over the world — Brazil, Mexico, China, Japan… I couldn’t have my phone near me,” Costa says. “But I showed my personality, because I wouldn’t accept things just because I have a top job. All coaches would have done the same.”
It was a win for individuals who had doubted the appointment in the first place.
“Maybe it closed some doors, leaving Clermont, but you have your principles,” she says. “This is what I believed, and if it was a man, he would do exactly the same thing.”
Helena Costa is offered as Clermont Foot supervisor in 2014 (Alexander Roth-Grisard/Getty Images)
The quirk in the story is that Clermont appointed a female successor to Costa.
Corinne Diacre was in cost for 3 seasons earlier than changing into France ladies’s head coach. Others have coached men’s groups at decrease ranges: former Italy worldwide Carolina Morace (Viterbese, Italy), Imke Wubbenhorst (BV Cloppenburg and SportFreunde Lotte, Germany) and Hannah Dingley (Forest Green Rovers, England) are amongst a small cohort to have been given an opportunity.
Costa thinks there will probably be extra.
“As a coach, that first impact is really important. They have expectations, they have doubts, but once you start working, it has to be natural,” she says. “People might look at you as a woman, but they have to judge how good you are. After, there is a natural acceptance.”
In Major League Soccer, only two ladies have ever held the general-manager function — an in depth equal at a few of its franchises to that of a sporting director in Europe: Lynne Meterparel with San Jose Earthquakes in 1999 and Englishwoman Lucy Rushton — who had held analyst and recruitment roles at Watford, Reading and Atlanta United of MLS — with D.C. United in 2021 earlier than transferring into the ladies’s game the following 12 months.
There are many ladies who work on the company facet of the game, comparable to Erling Haaland’s consultant Rafaela Pimenta — who spoke about sexism in soccer boardrooms in this interview with The Athletic in 2025 — and Melissa Onana, sister of Aston Villa midfielder Amadou.
But others are following in the footsteps of Costa through scouting and recruitment roles at golf equipment.
Julia Arpizou manages the scouting division at Ligue 1 facet Toulouse and Amy Woff is a senior positional analyst at Arsenal who accomplished UEFA’s elite scout programme.
Mariela Nisotaki’s function in serving to establish and recruit Emiliano Buendia to Norwich City — a participant later sold to Villa for £38million ($52m) — noticed her rise from first-team scout to go of rising expertise, after roles at Swansea City and in Greece. She is now head of group expertise acquisition for Southampton in England’s second-tier Championship.
“It’s great to have people that have made it,” Nisotaki says of Costa. “Helena was not afraid to go through different challenges, out of the comfort zone. This is what inspires me personally. She has done it very well and deserves to be where she is.”
UEFA’s sporting director programme launched in 2025, however only 4 of 35 contributors had been female and so they all work in the ladies’s game. FIFA and the FA run related programs. Costa hopes extra individuals attempt to — importantly — are given alternatives, so she just isn’t such an outlier.
Costa has performed all this regardless of being advised not to enter soccer by her dad and mom. “It wasn’t something normal — it still isn’t,” she says. “They tried to change my mind and go in a different direction.”
Undeterred, she would go down the teaching moderately than taking part in street, backed up by a PhD in sports activities science. It was only final 12 months that her father accompanied her to a game for the first time.
“Everyone accepts it now from my family,” she says, conceding with a smile: “They are proud now, yes.”
Estoril are one among a handful of golf equipment — together with Augsburg (Germany’s top-flight Bundesliga) and Beveren (Belgian second tier) — owned by U.S. businessman David Blitzer’s Global Football Holdings.
“You have to depend on someone who remembers you and believes in you,” Costa says of the alternative. “It’s a consequence of all the other things I’ve done. Coaching opened the door, then scouting to chief scout, and chief scout to sporting director. This is a very small world.”
Sporting and technical director roles at golf equipment come in all sizes and styles, however Costa’s is all-encompassing. “It can be a 24-7 job without any effort,” she says. Player buying and selling comes naturally. And managing a “tight” finances. But that’s coupled with “developing young players, hiring the doctor, physiotherapist and managing the grass”.
She is now not directly linked — because of Estoril’s multi-club construction — to somebody with whom she loved nice success beforehand: Crystal Palace supervisor Glasner. Blitzer remains to be a minority shareholder in the south London membership.
Helena Costa is working inside a multi-club construction at Estoril (Estoril)
After Clermont, Costa — through a return to Celtic — labored with the Austrian at Eintracht Frankfurt. During the German club’s triumphant Europa League run of 2021-22, Costa helped out because of her Portuguese connections. Four of their six group video games had been towards groups coached by compatriots of hers, Vitor Pereira (Fenerbahce of Turkey) and Pedro Martins (Greece’s Olympiacos). Frankfurt went unbeaten in these matches, successful two and drawing two.
“My involvement was helping out a little bit, translating press conferences, how they think,” she explains. “We created something that still exists. I keep in touch with him (Glasner) sometimes. It’s funny that it has happened.”
Like Estoril now and Frankfurt earlier than, Costa has typically discovered herself at golf equipment — and nations — that want to vary route.
She spent 18 months at Watford in the Championship as chief scout alongside Ben Manga, whom she adopted from Frankfurt. Her arrival in 2022 adopted the membership’s relegation from the Premier League. She calls it “a really important time”, having to take care of “different personalities” and “economical situations” with out parachute payments.
Helena Costa throughout her time at Watford (Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
Coaching Qatar’s ladies’s staff was “the hardest job of my life”, she says, “because of the culture“. Just after the Gulf state was awarded the men’s 2022 World Cup, Costa was charged with earning her team a place in the FIFA world rankings. “We had to build it and develop women’s football, but in a very short period of time,” she says of her appointment in 2010.
Primary colleges and universities had been scouted for expertise, coaching classes with ladies from age eight upwards had been organised, and oldsters had been persuaded that their daughters ought to play, regardless of conventional restrictions in Qatar on women and girls participating in soccer. Costa says: “I couldn’t photograph the girls or show what they were doing, or how fast they were learning.”
She was reunited with lots of the younger gamers she had helped at the opening game of that 2022 men’s event.
Costa has additionally stored in contact with these she went on to teach in Iran.
“People I was connected with had their homes affected with the bombs; it was a really sad day,” she says of U.S. air strikes in 2025.
Of the ‘women, life, freedom’ protests that started simply earlier than the World Cup in 2022, following the loss of life of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, Costa stays steadfastly supportive.
“They just want to have their own personality, their own freedom to choose their daily life,” she says. “They were expecting to have this revolution, and wishing to have freedom. So what’s happening (their protests against oppression) is really natural.”