-
Jeff Kassouf
New Boston Legacy FC head coach Filipa Patão wants to make this known: Her teams play with passion.
Patão, who spent the past five years coaching Portuguese side Benfica, was officially announced on Wednesday as the first head coach of Boston’s 2026 NWSL expansion team, as ESPN previously reported. She promised an aggressive style of soccer from the outset.
“First of all, they’re going to see that my teams are very, very competitive, very intense, very aggressive,” Patão told ESPN. “I like to press; I like to win the ball fast because I like to have the ball. I was a player, so the thing that I most like in football is having the ball. For me, it does not make sense to have a game where you are without the ball.”
Patão, who played for Benfica and Portugal as a player, personifies the passion she expects from her team. The 36-year-old said she felt that was a shared vision as she went through a series of interviews with executives from Boston, including Legacy FC general manager Domènec Guasch.
“In the interviews, I started to feel like this project is going to be like the perfect marriage, because the way that they presented the project, the way that we talked the same language of football,” Patão said.
That common language centered around Boston’s being solely a women’s club with plans for dedicated stadium and training spaces, and around soccer at its purist level. Patão talks about training in small spaces, where creativity and ingenuity are required, to solve problems that often occur in games.
During the interview process, she found a shared vision with Guasch, who became Boston’s first general manager after over a decade with Barcelona in various roles.
Patão said that while she loves for her teams to keep the ball, she is adaptable — an important characteristic for coaching in the NWSL, where games are often won in transition.
“If you are a good player, you can do everything. Because we need to be flexible,” Patão said.
She said she will mold her style of play around the strengths of the players that Boston signs.
“I like to be chameleonic,” Patão told ESPN. “I have a lot of colors. You need to have this type of capacity to change a little bit when it is necessary to win. It’s not a problem, because [having an] identity is the best tool to win. This is my identity.”
Patão draws inspiration from coaches such as Paris Saint-Germain‘s Luis Enrique. She credits António Fonte Santa, Benfica’s women’s technical director, for giving her a shot to work with some of Benfica’s boys’ academy teams before she took over the women’s senior team.
Benfica won five consecutive women’s senior league titles under Patão and became the first Portuguese team to qualify for the UEFA Women’s Champions League quarterfinals when they got out of the group in the 2023-24 season. Now, Patão hopes to translate that success in arguably the world’s toughest league.
Boston can begin signing players on July 1. Legacy FC, and the yet unnamed Denver expansion team, will be able to loan players within the NWSL — a new development for all teams — and will have significantly more cash at their disposal as they build rosters from scratch.
Expansion teams across all sports, including in the NWSL, have historically struggled in their first season of play. The NWSL has also historically been unforgiving to international coaches without prior experience in the U.S.
Patão said she is undaunted by the task.
“It’s not [about] patience; it’s believing in process,” she told ESPN. “The process — you don’t start to be the best in the first moment of the project, in the first day or in the first month, but if you continue to have consolidation of your process and you really, really believe in this process, it is impossible to fail. We don’t have the magical solution in football; nobody has it.”
Patão said “we want the best players and we’re gonna have the best players,” adding that it is her “mission” making them feel like they are the best.
For the enthusiastic Portuguese coach, success is also rooted in the need for joy and passion. She said she retired from playing not because she couldn’t meet the level, but because she was tired.
“Don’t forget the passion,” she said she will tell her players. “Football is chaotic; it’s a lot of pressure. Pressure, pressure; win, win. Do your best because everybody wants to be the best. This is exhausting, ok? And when we are like this, we start to lose the passion, we start to lose what brings us to the game.”
