Ball – It’s been 15 years since the Portuguese scored a lot at Benfica (Benfica)

Thirteen games, scored 35 goals, and conceded six goals, which is a noticeable attacking pattern for a team built by the head of German coach Roger Schmidt, but he has a deep Portuguese wrinkle, especially in terms of the number of goals scored. 21 of them belong to Goncalo Ramos (eight), Rafa (six), Joao Mario (five), Diogo Gonçalves and Henrique Araujo, while the group of foreign scorers is led by Brazilian David Neres, with five shots in the net.

The Portuguese’s influence on Benfica’s total goals is clear and 60 per cent is hard to beat. You have to go back to 2005/06, the season marked by a great European campaign by Ronald Koeman, to find the best. And the Dutch coach led Benfica to the Champions League quarter-finals, after he was eliminated by the great Barcelona, ​​Ronaldinho Gaucho, after his departure from Manchester United, in the group stage, and Liverpool, the defending champion, along the way. Round of 16.

Koeman’s Benfica side were a team with a clear Portuguese identity, with notable players such as Nuno Gomez and Simao Sabrosa playing the cards, but they scored only 20 goals in their first 13 games of the season. Of those 20 goals, 16 were goals by Portuguese players, which means an 80% Portuguese influence on the total number of goals scored.

Nuno Gomez, the former Portuguese international and captain of the Reds team, has the biggest slice of the pie, with nine accurate shots, two of them to FC Porto, in Dragao, allowing Benfica to win (2-0), while Simao Sabrosa, who was playing Usually as a left winger and currently as director of international relations at Benfica, he has scored six of them, one of them in the derby with Sporting. The other Portuguese goal belongs to Manuel Fernandez, a young midfielder who scored a beautiful goal at Villarreal, in one of the Champions League matches.

The 2007/2008 season, to which Fernando Santos, Jose Antonio Camacho and Fernando Challana belong, was also interesting in terms of the Portuguese character on goals, with two names in the spotlight: Nuno Gomez, one of the leading attacking figures in the former. Half of the century, talent number 10 who returned to Luz after so many years. He went by the name of… Roy Costa. Between these two goals, 9 of the 15 goals scored by the Eagles in their first 13 matches, the Portuguese influence was 60% in total, as is the case today at Benfica under Schmidt.