Pinto da Costa, a man of (both) old and new football ways

This paper takes a look at the ways in which soccer clubs are run in Portugal, focusing on the longest-serving and most successful club leader in Portuguese soccer, FC Porto’ president Jorge Nuno Pinto da Costa. Based on this case, the aim is to show that the permeability of soccer capital to economic and financial capital has not exhausted a traditional, amateur way of governance based on the ethos of (male) honour and the representation of a moral community. The style of exercising soccer power embodied in Pinto da Costa is, thus, a mixed composition of plural and even contradictory logics that constitute the space of possibilities for sports leadership action in Portugal.