Everton managerial contender ‘blew Pep Guardiola’s mind’

Vitor Pereira, who has emerged as one of the main contenders to become the next permanent Everton manager, claims to have once blown Pep Guardiola’s mind with a key piece of tactical advice.

Some reports have suggested that the 51-year-old is now the Blues number one candidate to replace compatriot Marco Silva and that talks over a potential switch to Goodison Park will begin over the next 24 hours.

Pereira, whose career honours include a brace of Portuguese championships with Porto plus league titles with Olympiakos in Greece and his current employers, Shanghai SIPG in China, embarked on a fact-finding mission to Germany back in 2014 to learn from the Pep Guardiola but reckons he ended up teaching the Bayern Munich boss a thing or two.

The details of their meeting were reported by Diário Record – Portugal’s leading sports newspaper.

Their executive editor David Novo told the ECHO: “Vitor spent some days in Munich to see how Bayern played. He told us how he talked a lot with Pep Guardiola about football and particularly tactics.

“Vitor tells the story that he said: ‘Pep, in some games you expose your defence in the moment of transition.

“He was having lunch in a restaurant with Pep and they started to draw some tactical manoeuvres on the table cloth.

“Vitor said he told Pep: ‘I’m going to suggest something to you, if you take it, here it is.

“He then drew an exercise explaining how he’d already experienced the same problem with some of his teams in the past but he had solved the issue with that way.

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“He illustrated it himself so Pep could use it to correct the problem.”