Meet Helena Costa, the only female sporting director in the men’s game

“It’s good when someone remembers that you could be Mourinho in a skirt, right?” says Helena Costa with a smile as she talks to The Athletic on the veranda of a plush Spanish hotel.

The nickname — coined in her and Mourinho’s homeland of Portugal more than a decade ago — is one piece of a globetrotting jigsaw puzzle constructed by a trailblazer.

Costa, 47, has broken new ground for women in states where their rights are restricted (Qatar and Iran), made a controversial principled stand, won a European trophy with Oliver Glasner and shattered glass ceilings at every turn.

Her latest first is becoming the only female sporting director in the men’s game worldwide.

Not that she gets carried away by these sorts of things.

“It has to mean something. But for me, it’s also natural,” she says. “I don’t think it has any impact in my life, but it’s important to open doors as well.”

She pauses before clarifying: “But it’s also a responsibility, because it has to work. Otherwise, it won’t open doors anyway.”

In the role for just over a year at Portuguese top-flight side Estoril, she is speaking in Malaga a day after an event run by TransferRoom, an online platform that facilitates transfer deals between clubs. Watching Costa mingle among 200 to 300 peers and take part in 15-minute ‘speed-dating’ style meetings could not be easier.

Why? Because she is very easy to spot, being one of only two women in the large conference suite.

She says being in her position is a “big step” and hopes to “have changed the mindset of people”, even though it shouldn’t need to be this way. “If you’re a teacher, it doesn’t matter if you’re a woman or a man, you have to be competent and good in what you do,” she says. “Happy, too.”

The Mourinho-in-a-skirt nickname arose when Costa became the first female coach of a men’s side, taking charge of French side Clermont Foot in 2014. “It was at a time when he was really successful,” she says. While crass and lazy, the moniker did at least have a link to reality at a time when her male counterpart was excelling.

Costa — who appears in a special transfers-themed episode of The Athletic FC Podcast — started her coaching journey at Benfica’s academy in the late 1990s, just before Mourinho took charge of the Lisbon club’s senior team for the first time (he rejoined them last September). Following a chance meeting between the pair at a pre-season friendly in 2005, she spent time analysing the academy setup at Chelsea during his first spell as manager there. He had opened doors, but she was the one having to prove herself.

The building blocks of her career came during more than a decade coaching in Benfica’s academy system, and at lower-league sides Cheleirense, Sociedade Uniao 1º Dezembro and Leixoes, where she also took her first steps in recruitment. In Scotland, where she took her UEFA A Licence (she has since reached UEFA Pro standard), she made a connection at Celtic, who took her on as one of the world’s first female scouts.

Via Qatar’s and Iran’s women’s teams, she was given the chance at French second-division side Clermont Foot. FIFA’s then president Sepp Blatter and Arsenal’s manager at the time Arsene Wenger commended a historic step, but it quickly turned into a nightmare.

Within six weeks, Costa had left, falling out with the club’s hierarchy about transfers. “I could have stayed, but I didn’t accept things that I think nobody would accept,” she recalls. “So that’s why I didn’t care if it had a world impact like it did.”

Having been installed as the first female coach of any male team in the top two divisions anywhere in Europe, the decision — which she calls a “moment of huge learning” — was as bold as the initial appointment.

“There was a crazy impact all over the world — Brazil, Mexico, China, Japan… I couldn’t have my phone near me,” Costa says. “But I showed my personality, because I wouldn’t accept things just because I have a top job. All coaches would have done the same.”

It was a win for those who had doubted the appointment in the first place.

“Maybe it closed some doors, leaving Clermont, but you have your principles,” she says. “This is what I believed, and if it was a man, he would do exactly the same thing.”

The quirk in the story is that Clermont appointed a female successor to Costa.

Corinne Diacre was in charge for three seasons before becoming France women’s head coach. Others have coached men’s teams at lower levels: former Italy international Carolina Morace (Viterbese, Italy), Imke Wubbenhorst (BV Cloppenburg and SportFreunde Lotte, Germany) and Hannah Dingley (Forest Green Rovers, England) are among a small cohort to have been given a chance.

Costa thinks there will be more.

“As a coach, that first impact is really important. They have expectations, they have doubts, but once you start working, it has to be natural,” she says. “People might look at you as a woman, but they have to judge how good you are. After, there is a natural acceptance.”

In Major League Soccer, only two women have ever held the general-manager role — a close equivalent at some of its franchises to that of a sporting director in Europe: Lynne Meterparel with San Jose Earthquakes in 1999 and Englishwoman Lucy Rushton — who had held analyst and recruitment roles at Watford, Reading and Atlanta United of MLS — with D.C. United in 2021 before moving into the women’s game the following year.

There are many women who work on the agency side of the game, such as Erling Haaland’s representative Rafaela Pimenta — who spoke about sexism in football boardrooms in this interview with The Athletic in 2025 — and Melissa Onana, sister of Aston Villa midfielder Amadou.

But others are following in the footsteps of Costa via scouting and recruitment roles at clubs.

Julia Arpizou manages the scouting department at Ligue 1 side Toulouse and Amy Woff is a senior positional analyst at Arsenal who completed UEFA’s elite scout programme.

Mariela Nisotaki’s role in helping identify and recruit Emiliano Buendia to Norwich City — a player later sold to Villa for £38million ($52m) — saw her rise from first-team scout to head of emerging talent, after roles at Swansea City and in Greece. She is now head of group talent acquisition for Southampton in England’s second-tier Championship.

“It’s great to have people that have made it,” Nisotaki says of Costa. “Helena was not afraid to go through different challenges, out of the comfort zone. This is what inspires me personally. She has done it very well and deserves to be where she is.”

UEFA’s sporting director programme launched in 2025, but only four of 35 participants were female and they all work in the women’s game. FIFA and the FA run similar courses. Costa hopes more people try and — importantly — are given opportunities, so she is not such an outlier.

Costa has done all this despite being told not to go into football by her parents. “It wasn’t something normal — it still isn’t,” she says. “They tried to change my mind and go in a different direction.”

Undeterred, she would go down the coaching rather than playing road, backed up by a PhD in sports science. It was only last year that her father accompanied her to a game for the first time.

“Everyone accepts it now from my family,” she says, conceding with a smile: “They are proud now, yes.”

Estoril are one of a handful of clubs — including Augsburg (Germany’s top-flight Bundesliga) and Beveren (Belgian second tier) — owned by U.S. businessman David Blitzer’s Global Football Holdings.

“You have to depend on someone who remembers you and believes in you,” Costa says of the opportunity. “It’s a consequence of all the other things I’ve done. Coaching opened the door, then scouting to chief scout, and chief scout to sporting director. This is a very small world.”

Sporting and technical director roles at clubs come in all shapes and sizes, but Costa’s is all-encompassing. “It can be a 24-7 job without any effort,” she says. Player trading comes naturally. And managing a “tight” budget. But that’s coupled with “developing young players, hiring the doctor, physiotherapist and managing the grass”.

She is now indirectly linked — thanks to Estoril’s multi-club structure — to someone with whom she enjoyed great success previously: Crystal Palace manager Glasner. Blitzer is still a minority shareholder in the south London club.

After Clermont, Costa — via a return to Celtic — worked with the Austrian at Eintracht Frankfurt. During the German club’s triumphant Europa League run of 2021-22, Costa helped out due to her Portuguese connections. Four of their six group games were against teams coached by compatriots of hers, Vitor Pereira (Fenerbahce of Turkey) and Pedro Martins (Greece’s Olympiacos). Frankfurt went unbeaten in those matches, winning two and drawing two.

“My involvement was helping out a little bit, translating press conferences, how they think,” she explains. “We created something that still exists. I keep in touch with him (Glasner) sometimes. It’s funny that it has happened.”

Like Estoril now and Frankfurt before, Costa has often found herself at clubs — and countries — that need to change direction.

She spent 18 months at Watford in the Championship as chief scout alongside Ben Manga, whom she followed from Frankfurt. Her arrival in 2022 followed the club’s relegation from the Premier League. She calls it “a really important time”, having to deal with “different personalities” and “economical situations” without parachute payments.

Coaching Qatar’s women’s team was “the hardest job of my life”, she says, “because of the culture“. Just after the Gulf state was awarded the men’s 2022 World Cup, Costa was charged with earning her team a place in the FIFA world rankings. “We had to build it and develop women’s football, but in a very short period of time,” she says of her appointment in 2010.

Primary schools and universities were scouted for talent, training sessions with girls from age eight upwards were organised, and parents were persuaded that their daughters should play, despite traditional restrictions in Qatar on girls and women taking part in football. Costa says: “I couldn’t photograph the girls or show what they were doing, or how fast they were learning.”

She was reunited with many of the young players she had helped at the opening game of that 2022 men’s tournament.

Costa has also kept in touch with those she went on to coach in Iran.

“People I was connected with had their homes affected with the bombs; it was a really sad day,” she says of U.S. air strikes in 2025.

Of the ‘women, life, freedom’ protests that began just before the World Cup in 2022, following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, Costa remains steadfastly supportive.

“They just want to have their own personality, their own freedom to choose their daily life,” she says. “They were expecting to have this revolution, and wishing to have freedom. So what’s happening (their protests against oppression) is really natural.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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