In early August 2010, with little ceremony or saga, it was announced that Manchester United
had signed a 20-year-old Portuguese forward from Vitoria de Guimaraes.
Just over a month earlier, Tiago Manuel Dias Correia – better known as Bebe – had moved
to Vitoria from Estrela da Amadora.
It was a remarkably rapid ascent. Bebe had spent just a single season in the Portuguese
third division and, due to Estrella’s financial difficulties, had been allowed to move for
free. After a series of encouraging pre-season performances, just weeks after joining, he
was quickly offered a new contract by Vitoria, which included a £7.4m release clause, duly
activated by Manchester United.
Alex Ferguson had never actually seen Bebe play. Instead, he insisted, he was acting
upon the recommendation of Carlos Quieroz, his former assistant manager. In the years
after, Quieroz would deny this, saying that he had never heard of Bebe.
That was certainly confusing enough. But the reality was stranger still. Less than a week
before concluding the move, Bebe had sacked his agent of a year, Goncalo Reis, signing
instead with Jorge Mendes’ Gestifute agency. Mendes also reportedly paid €100,000 for
30% of the player’s economic rights days before the transfer was agreed. When it was,
on top of his agent’s commission, he and Gestifute were entitled to 30% of the fee.
Reis would eventually lodge a complaint with FIFA, claiming that his two-year contract
with Bebe had been violated and that Gestifute had stolen the player. In 2012, the transfer
was even the subject of an investigation by the Portuguese police.
Bebe had grown up in poverty. He and his four siblings were abandoned following their parents’
divorce and were initially raised by a grandmother. Before he was a teenager, he would move to
Casa do Gaiato, a shelter on the outskirts of Lisbon, which was funded and run by the
Catholic church.
He was still living at Casa do Gaiato when his professional career began and had only
just moved out when his move to Manchester United was completed. From earning £300 per
week, his wages rose to £17,000 a week at Old Trafford and, reportedly, included a £500,000
signing-on fee.
It was a fairy tale – just without the perfect ending. He wasn’t a success at Manchester
United. He would stay four years at the club in total, but three of those seasons would
be spent out on loan and he would play just 332 minutes for the club.
At the time of his transfer, Jorge Paixão, who had been one of Bebe’s coaches at Estrela,
was interviewed on Portuguese radio.
“Nowadays,” Paixão said “players are schooled in the clubs. He has none of this.
He’s old school. He learned to play in the street and has that natural creativity.”
Within his effusive praise probably lies a diagnosis.
He was right. Bebe certainly did have natural creativity. He was also skilful, quick and
physical, but – perhaps – the lack of a formal footballing education was prohibitive.
He struggled tactically and without the ball, experiencing difficulties with the more discipline-based
parts of the game.
Bebe would be loaned to Besiktas in 2011, where a damaged cruciate ligament and a dalliance
with the nightlife would stymie his progress. In 2012 he would be sent to Rio Ave in his
native Portugal and in 2013, in a trend indicative of his trajectory, he would join Pacos de
Ferreira, who had survived Liga Nos relegation the season before only by winning a playoff.
It would be the most prolific spell of his career, though. Bebe would score 12 goals
in 27 league appearances, flickering with enough talent to revive the market around
him. In 2014, Benfica were the next to gamble, paying just over £2.5m to sign him.
A Benfica fan as a child and no doubt worn down by the strain of an increasingly nomadic
career, Bebe, described the day of his sale as ‘the best of his life’. But his recollections
of his time at United are also, in parts, contradictory. “Every day I called my agent
to ask him to get me out, he told Goal in 2018. “It was a bad time.”
His speaks well of the people involved, though. Of Ferguson, from whom he rented his house.
And of Anderson, the Portuguese-speaking Brazilian midfielder, who had welcomed him to Manchester
upon his arrival, opening his home and treating him like a family member.
Bebe has also taken ownership of his failure to grasp that opportunity, admitting that
he “never took Manchester United seriously”. He recognises his complacency, too, and recalls
treating his arrival at the club as his career’s end point. ‘I’m here, I’m doing well
and I don’t have to try hard every day’ he recalled thinking in an interview with
Maisfutebol.
“It was my fault.”
As at United, he was peripheral at Benfica, spending eighteen months of his two years
out on loan. But it would lead to a modicum of stability. Six months with Cordoba and
then a further year with Rayo Vallecano in 2015-16 would, in spite of Rayo’s relegation,
show Bebe to be a viable La Liga player.
It helped, of course, that in manager Paco Jemez, he was working for a coach with a near
reckless commitment to attacking football, and one who was ambivalent towards many of
the positioning and tactical impulses missing from his playing personality.
Highlights included a scything run and hit against Espanyol and, more memorably, an outrageous
knuckleball free-kick against Sevilla. Bebe was still highly unorthodox, with an upright
dribbling stance and unusual gait, but his talent would appear in flashes, particularly
when he ran at defenders.
Rayo were doomed, but Bebe would stay in the top-flight, earning a permanent move from
Benfica to Eibar, where he would enjoy a moderately successful first season. Halfway through his
second, however, he would return to Rayo Vallecano on loan initially and then, on the final day
of the 2018 transfer window, on a permanent basis, where he remains to this day.
He would never rise to the top of his game. Nor would he add to his solitary cap for Portugal’s
u21 side or earn full international honours, but his ability wasn’t illusory. As Ferguson
wrote in his 2013 autobiography:
“Bebe came with limitations but there was a talent there.”
The assessment seems fair. Footage of those few friendlies with Vitoria de Guimaraes still
exists online and it’s difficult not to be impressed by Bebe, however shrouded in
suspicion the mechanics of his career may now be. With his long dreadlocks and muscular
build, he’s too skilful, too quick and too strong for his opponents, time again.
A phenomenon he was not, but a very good player he might well have become.