Vitor Pereira has been here before.
Nottingham Forest’s fourth head coach of this season has taken over a Premier League club in relegation trouble before. He’s worked with Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis before. He’s worked in chaotic, febrile atmospheres before.
And it’s also true in a literal sense this week, with football’s narrative gods having decreed that his first game in charge of Forest will be away against a team he has had two spells as manager of: Fenerbahce of Turkey.
As with much of Pereira’s globetrotting coaching career, those two stints with the Istanbul side were relatively short: just over one full season for the first, and slightly less than half a season second time around. But then again, most managers Fenerbahce have had in the past decade or so have not lasted long: the 61 games Pereira took charge of in that initial spell is the second-longest single period anyone has held the role since their most recent Turkish title win in 2013-14.
Again, this is a man used to chaotic, febrile atmospheres.
Pereira arrived in Istanbul in summer 2015, fresh from six months in Greece, where he had won the double with Marinakis-owned Olympiacos, Forest’s sister club. He took over a squad that was pure Turkish Super Lig: stuffed with ageing stars whose time at the higher echelons of European football was over, but had another couple of years left in them at a decent level. Robin van Persie, Nani, Raul Meireles, Bruno Alves and Brazilian playmaker Diego were all there, surrounded by a collection of keen young Turkish talent and the odd domestic stalwart, such as Mehmet Topal and Volkan Demirel.
On the face of things, what followed was a perfectly decent season: Fenerbahce finished second in the league, five points behind Besiktas, were Turkish Cup finalists (losing 1-0 to Galatasaray), and got to the last 16 of the Europa League. There were some spicy moments along the way, not least the game in which they were eliminated from Europe, against Braga of Portugal, when Topal, Alper Potuk and Volkan Sen were all sent off in the second half of a 4-1 away defeat (for a 4-2 aggregate loss), and Pereira managed to get himself dismissed before half-time for persistent arguing with the officials.
It also featured a few tricky moments with some of those veteran stars, which we’ll get to later, but the real drama was saved for the end of his reign.
Despite going into that 2015-16 season with the motto “The only way is the championship”, which then wasn’t delivered, president Aziz Yildirim decided to keep Pereira in place for the start of the following campaign.
Yet he didn’t even make it to the opening Super Lig fixture.
After a 4-3 aggregate loss to Monaco of France’s Ligue 1 in Champions League qualification in early August, Fenerbahce’s first two matches that season, Pereira left Istanbul and returned to Portugal with little notice, in his words, “due to threats and a tense atmosphere”. In a statement at the time, he said: “Following the defeat against Monaco, Fenerbahce decided to prevent me from carrying out my duties as head coach, disregarding my employment contract.”
There were confusing scenes as players showed up to training with nobody but goalkeeping coach Paolo Orlandoni there to greet them. Yildirim was unimpressed and promptly sacked Pereira, suggesting in a club statement that he had contradicted plans made at the end of the previous season, leading to that early elimination from the Champions League.
The rest of Pereira’s backroom staff seemed to be in the dark.
“This was mostly between the head coach and the president or the sports director,” Bruno Ribeiro, who worked with Pereira at five different clubs, including that first year in Turkey, tells The Athletic. “I don’t know exactly what happened. It was after a Champions League match against Monaco. So I think it was a question of disappointment with the result, maybe, and we left the club.”
Yildirim later explained that Pereira’s “unwillingness to address the shortcomings identified and reported to him from the previous season”, in addition to “his insistence on squad and formation choices that were not in line with his squad and transfer plans”, and of course him going AWOL, left him with little choice.
With that rather less than friendly exit from the Fenerbahce job, you might think it slightly surprising that Pereira returned to it five years later. But by that time, the president and most of the club hierarchy had left: Ali Koc, a member of one of the richest families in Turkey, had taken over, and Pereira became the fifth manager he had appointed in three years as part of his increasingly frantic quest to bring back 19-times domestic champions Fenerbahce’s glory days.
“Fenerbahce was an unfinished love for me,” Pereira said at his unveiling. “I have won trophies in almost every club I have been to in my career. But I could not win a trophy in Fenerbahce. Now is the time to crown this unfinished story with championship trophies. Then this unfinished story will have a happy ending.”
That second spell began pretty well domestically, with wins in six of the first eight league games, but a rough start in the Europa League was followed by the wheels starting to come off in a controversial Super Lig game against Trabzonspor, when defender Kim Min-jae was sent off in the first half and they lost 3-1. That was the first of three defeats in a row, which came shortly after a 3-0 home loss to Olympiacos in the Europa League.
Things never really recovered from there, and despite a 2-1 away win over rivals Galatasaray, Pereira was sacked in the middle of that December.
The view from the hierarchy was that they liked Pereira and admired elements of his work, but that results couldn’t continue as they were: after all, sacking a manager mid-season is not unusual at Fenerbahce. “Most of the time, the first head to roll is the manager,” says Selahattin Baki, who was on the board at that time. “But there’s nothing I can say that’s bad about him.”
That isn’t a universal view. Other staff members did not warm to Pereira as much, and relationships with some of the players were tricky, too, in both spells. A few years after they worked together, veteran goalkeeper Demirel ranked Pereira as his second-least favourite of the 10 coaches he worked under at the club, ahead of only Dutchman Phillip Cocu.
That spoke to a perception that Pereira couldn’t manage the bigger stars, a narrative that spanned both his stints. “He’s someone who has problems with quality players,” Mahmut Uslu, a board member during his first spell, told Turkish newspaper Hurriyet.
Van Persie was one example of this.
The Netherlands international striker had arrived from Manchester United in July 2015 to much fanfare, but in the initial months of that season, he was in and out of the team, with Pereira seeming to prefer the Brazilian Fernandao. This came to a head in a game against Bursaspor, when Van Persie was named on the bench again.
The pair appeared to argue when the Dutchman was introduced as a second-half substitute, and following the game — in which he scored the winner three minutes after coming on — Van Persie said: “I was not happy that I started on the bench. I am fully fit, physically very well, and able to play for 90 minutes. The only right answer I could give was with what I did: helping the team to get the victory.”
Robin van Persie was less than impressed at his lack of playing time under Vitor Pereira (Svein Ove Ekornesvaag/AFP via Getty Images)
For his part, Pereira tried to brush off any sort of controversy, even suggesting that the two of them butting heads would be a positive thing.
“Sometimes high-tension stuff happens, but in football we can solve these kinds of situations perfectly,” he said, striking a similar theme to his words after taking over at Forest, when he said there was “fire and passion” between him and his old Olympiacos boss Marinakis. “Many times in football, to win games, you need these kinds of tensions. If we are all calm, you can’t win the games.”
“Some of these players, they were not in the best level they were three or four or five years earlier,” says Ribeiro. “We needed to understand that, and to push as much as we can as a staff to have them helping the team and performing well. The pressure (that comes with signing big names) is normal. When you sign a big name, or two or three or four, the pressure becomes high, or becomes even more than before.“
Mesut Ozil was another big-name arrival, in his case from that second spell.
Pereira initially played a 3-4-3 system that didn’t suit Ozil, and the former Arsenal man often found himself on the bench. But given Ozil was, at the time, perhaps the biggest signing in Turkish football history, never mind that of Fenerbahce, it was gently suggested that Pereira should find a system that did work for him. “Coach Vitor should reconsider how he can best utilise Mesut,” said Koc.
This mushroomed into the sort of drama that gets inflated beyond sense, where every little thing is interpreted as part of the narrative. For example, there was a slightly silly incident when Ozil was deemed to have ‘thrown a bib’ at Pereira after being an unused substitute in a game against Kasimpasa: closer inspection revealed he actually chucked it onto the floor, vaguely near his manager.
Still, it would be tricky to argue that the two got on, with Ozil’s angry reaction to being substituted in a Europa League game against Antwerp of Belgium being a case in point. After Pereira was fired, the German quite pointedly posted a picture of himself with Burak Kapacak, one of the other players who had been left out of the team.
One clear positive that did come from Pereira’s second spell was giving a debut to Arda Guler, now at Real Madrid and a star of Turkey’s national team, who was just 16 at the time.
“He played like he would in the street with his friends,” Pereira told The Athletic in 2024. “He had no fear to take risks. It was very impressive. From the first day, we felt the experienced players respected him. They would pass him the ball, to respect when he took risks, when he took shots, crosses. If he missed, he would try again, again, again. We imagined a great future for him.”
It was also at Fenerbahce where the new Forest coach displayed his talent for improvisation.
Ferdi Kadioglu had played most of his games as an attacking midfielder or winger, but it was Pereira who saw his defensive qualities and tried him as a wing-back, leading to him subsequently playing in the left-back position he broadly occupies these days for Brighton & Hove Albion. He did something similar with Bright Osayi-Samuel, to that point a winger and now a right-back for Birmingham City and Nigeria.
Pereira went on to have brief spells at Corinthians and Flamengo in Brazil, and Al Shabab in Saudi Arabia, before arriving in England in December 2024 to save Wolverhampton Wanderers from Premier League relegation. He pulled that off, but they fired him in early November after failing to win any of their first 10 league games this season.
Returning to the Sukru Saracoglu Stadium for the first time in over four years this week represents one of a few full-circle moments in his career, but those two stints on the Asian side of Istanbul are Pereira’s managerial career in microcosm: moments of brilliance, moments of volatility, but very few moments of tedium.
In that respect, it’s fitting that it is where his journey with Forest begins.