The Portuguese Coach Who Went Further Than Portugal at the 2026 World Cup
Morocco assistant coach João Sacramento reached the 2026 World Cup quarter-finals while Portugal crashed out in the round of 16. See what he told Record.
Portugal went out in the round of 16. Morocco made the quarter-finals. And sitting on the Moroccan bench was a Portuguese man with a smile on his face.
João Sacramento, assistant coach of the African side, lived a 2026 World Cup that his own country could not. He even admits the irony had never crossed his mind: "I hadn't thought about it," he told Record.
But there's more. In Morocco's match against Haiti, Sacramento ran into another compatriot: João Pinheiro, who served as fourth official. Two Portuguese men, in the same game, on the same side of the bracket — just wearing different shirts. "It was a source of pride for me to see a Portuguese referee at the World Cup," Sacramento said.
On Morocco's overall performance, the assistant coach rejects any suggestion of disappointment. With more teams and an extra knockout round in this edition, he argues that, in terms of wins, the campaign was equivalent to the historic run of 2022 — which, under the old format, would have amounted to a semi-final.
And Morocco's rise is no accident. "It isn't luck — there is very strong work behind this," Sacramento said, pointing to a project spanning more than a decade under the leadership of King Mohamed VI. Morocco now sits sixth in the world rankings and, according to Sacramento, has just overtaken Portugal on that list.
Golmetria's model had already identified Morocco as a genuine dark horse: before the tournament, the team had a 35% chance of reaching the quarter-finals — and they delivered exactly that. Portugal, meanwhile, exited earlier than the numbers had anticipated.
Morocco's strength, in Sacramento's view, has a simple explanation: "there is no room for egos." In a World Cup where giants stumbled early, that may be precisely what makes the difference.
And the question that lingers: how far can this Moroccan project still go?