On the inside of one arm, Filipa Patão has a tattoo of an eagle. It’s a recent addition, a reminder of a near lifelong connection to the Portuguese club Benfica.
On the inside of her other arm, Patão has an older tattoo — the outline of her grandfather, and a bag of peanuts. It’s a reminder of the man who forever supported her love of football, watching his granddaughter morph from an aggressive center back as a player to bold decision-maker as a coach, always with his favorite gametime snack by his side.
Connections to her past have shaped Patão, and now they carry her forward across the Atlantic. Patão, the recently named head coach of the NWSL expansion Boston Legacy FC, helped build the women’s program at Benfica, and is aimed toward building the Legacy from the ground up, too. It’s a big job, and a big change, but one the 36-year-old has been working toward for years.
“I think I say this many, many times in Portugal and now I say it in the States: I’m a person that searches every time for a challenge,” Patão told me on a video call from Portugal.
At Benfica, she exceeded those challenges over and over again — from her start as a club youth coach in 2007, initially with the men and then to the fledgling women’s program, to the U15, U17, and U19 women’s teams. Patão took over the senior women’s team in 2020. She amassed a 156-28-15 record across all competitions, winning the Campeonato Nacional (Portugal’s top flight) five years in a row while also taking Benfica to the quarterfinals of the 2023-24 UEFA Women’s Champions League, the first Portuguese club to advance that far. That was enough for a Ballon d’Or nomination as Women’s Coach of the Year in 2024, and enough to raise the antenna of the Boston Legacy ownership group.
Their pitch beat out interest from overseas, including at Liverpool.
“When I start to hear about the project, when I start to hear that they’re going to want to build everything new, and I can put some of my personality, some of my ideas, my philosophy, my passion . . . I felt at home,” Patão mused. “I felt a lot of passion about the project of Boston, in the football competition, from the supporters, from the city, everyone around. Honestly, it feels like Benfica. A little like this, the supporters here are very very passionate. There’s a lot of pressure on everybody, they want to win, but they want to have identity, an identity that represents them. I feel the same in Boston, in this team the Boston Legacy, and I want to build it.”
The process has already started, even though Patão — along with her English setter and her cat, named Oliver and Benji in honor of the anime footballers of Captain Tsubasa — won’t actually land in Boston until late July or early August. Her visa application is still working its way through official channels, as is the norm for foreign coaches and players. By the time the squad hits the field in 2026, Patão is out to prove the description from controlling owner Jennifer Epstein correct.
“Filipa demonstrates all of the qualities that personify this club and the way we want to play: with passion, grit, and style,” Epstein said in the team’s official announcement.
It starts with relentlessness for the ball, an attacking mind-set that led Patão to regularly hear her players described by European opponents “like dogs” for the way they’d press and fight for the ball.
“I was a player, and the most beautiful thing in football is having the ball,” she said. “If you want the ball, you’re forbidden to lose the ball, but if you lose it, OK, come on and catch it again. Be fast, be happy again with the ball. My teams are like that. One second to recover the ball. Everyone has to run, have a mission to recover that ball.”
And when they have it?
“I want players that want to take risk,” she said. “Football is a risk. You need to take risk. It’s impossible to have players afraid to take risk. This is the style I want to see. I want to see brave players, who want to play beautiful football, challenge themselves, go one-v-one if necessary.”
Patão compared it to educating a child.
“A young player, they’re like a sponge, want to absorb everything. When you build something new, you don’t have issues, don’t have anything, you’re like a white paper. You can write whatever you want and you can create a legacy like the name. You can create a history there,” she said. “It’s a great responsibility to write a good or bad thing. They chose me because of that.
“I love challenge. I love winning. I’m very, very competitive and I love to develop young players.”
In another time, or another place, Patão would have continued playing, pushing a budding career with the Portuguese national team to a top professional level. She would have focused on her passion for football instead of feeling it drain away as she squeezed in training at night, long after she’d finished her multiple other jobs, teaching at a school and training youth soccer clubs for hours at a time. There just wasn’t a high level of support for women’s players back then.
Times have changed in the decades since, and now she is creating opportunities for others.
“I didn’t have coaches that believed in me, worked with me, that thought all day about how I’m going to help my team, help my players to achieve great things. . . . So every time, I say to my players, please enjoy this ride, enjoy this life,” she said. “Now I’m a really happy person, I feel I’m doing something.
“It’s impossible to change the world but you can change the world of somebody, so do it.”
Tara Sullivan is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at tara.sullivan@globe.com. Follow her @Globe_Tara.