Benfica goes to the vote on October 25th. DN challenged the six candidates for the club’s presidency for the four-year period 2025-2029, Rui Costa, Luís Filipe Vieira, João Noronha Lopes, João Diogo Manteigas, Martim Mayer and Cristóvão Carvalho, to answer the same five questions on five essential topics in the life of the club, from the priority after the election, to politics and the sports project for football, passing through the liabilities and future of the Benfica institution. Here are Martim Mayer’s answers.
The priority of priorities, once elected is…
Benfica needs a structural change. We will introduce the Kaizen management methodology as a central tool in our management. Given the negative 70 million that SAD has to resolve on average every year – and which it does by selling our talent ahead of time – through the implementation of this methodology, we will be able to reduce total annual costs by around 20%, which exceed €150M per year, through the optimization of resources and contractual renegotiation with suppliers, without compromising the sporting ambition. At the same time, we will boost revenues, with a strong focus on the Benfica Global project, which foresees the creation of representative offices in Europe and the USA, as well as the creation of Benfica National Cards in Angola and Mozambique, projects that we have well advanced in, with defined partners, and which will allow an increase in revenues of over 30M per year from the second year onwards, thus returning sustainability to the club, without selling strategic training assets.
How is the balance found between training and the sporting demands of a club like Benfica: Training to sell and sustain the sporting project or training to feed the team and have sporting success.
As I explained in the previous answer. It is only possible to manage the club and football in such a way as to always make the best decisions without financial pressure, if, firstly, we do not start each season with accounts in the red of around 70M. This forced the club to sell players like João Neves, because the treasury was strangled and at risk of not fulfilling its immediate obligations. Retaining talent is only viable in this way, through rapid cost reduction, which is possible with the Kaizen Method and at the same time identifying new forms of revenue that involve the internationalization of the Benfica brand. Stability will also be needed, because at this moment, more than talking about retaining players from the formation, we are witnessing a lack of new values emerging in the main team from Seixal and that is the most worrying thing. It is necessary to have sporting stability, to stop the merry-go-round of entries and exits, so that there is space for the talents coming from the training.
Benfica presented a positive result of €34.4 ME. Liabilities fell to €474.9 million – is this still a problem? And how do you lower it further?
If we remove the amounts received from the sales of Benfica players from the accounts, during the current mandate, Benfica had a negative result of 280 million euros in 4 years. The Club should increase its position in SAD from the current 63% to 67% and simultaneously initiate a SAD capitalization operation together with strategic medium-long term Shareholders. The way to do this has been identified, but we will have to be in office to be able to announce it in detail at the time that best suits the club. With this recapitalization of SAD, it will be easy to reduce liabilities.
Does José Mourinho fit into your sporting project for football? Why?
He is one of the best coaches in the world, it was unthinkable not to fit. We want to change football from top to bottom, but having someone with this profile in charge of the team is a great starting point. It would have been easy for me to announce trips to create rumors about who my General Director would be, a position I designed for football, with a scope far beyond what this position has ever had at the club. My commitment to stability and your sporting success is such that I gave up something that would be an electoral asset to change the person who would occupy the position. Because whoever worked with me these months to define the entire structure is not compatible with Mourinho’s profile. It would be with Lage, but not with Mourinho. Therefore, I am hiring a new person adapted to this new technical team, in line with the first choice, who guarantees a 360º vision of Benfica’s football, with a lot of experience in professional football, training, scouting and also in women’s football.
What will Benfica look like in the future? (A reformist measure until 2030)
With me as Benfica’s Presidency, the club in 2030 will be truly Global. A well-capitalized Benfica, a Benfica in all the splendor that the creation of a proximity offer with its 20 million Lifetime Fans spread across the world allows us to idealize and makes it possible to achieve. With sporting activity at the highest level in Europe, Africa and North America, materializing revenues for the Club on a much higher scale than the current ones, allowing all these Members and Supporters to experience Benfica intensely and with this return to the massive sporting success that is the central pillar of the identity of the biggest club in the World: Sport Lisboa e Benfica.
isaura.almeida@dn.pt