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It was a big job and came with a big title.

Wilson, who was CFG’s director of football services, knew that Marques would be the ideal candidate.

“We were tasked with writing a football blueprint that we could pick up from Manchester and take out to Australia and coach and guide them on how to install that in Melbourne, then the same to New York and all the other clubs as and when they were acquired,” he explains.

“So Pedro came with me into that new section and he was the global lead for football performance.

“Pedro was a really good fit for that because he was analytical and he could also describe a coaching methodology and a way of playing.

He enjoyed being out on the grass but analysing players and matches came naturally to him, too.

In 2008, Marques was promoted to work with the first team at Sporting and thrived, so much so that a master’s degree was put on hold as his career took off – literally; he was flying all over the world to watch players.

“I formed a scouting team, we had four or five young boys and Pedro was the leader,” Pedro Barbosa, the former Portugal international who was sporting director at the time, tells The Athletic.

He will be a fantastic person for Liverpool.”

Marques’ first opportunity to work for an English club came about after he impressed Manchester City’s staff during a visit to Sporting, leading to him being offered the chance to move to the Etihad as a first-team performance analyst in 2010.

Although Wilson recalls that Marques needed a bit of persuading initially — City had just finished fifth in the Premier League and were a long way from being the team that they are today — the prospect of working for a club with the ambition and resources to take data in a new direction was too good to turn down.

Prozone provided off-the-shelf data packages to Premier League clubs at that time, but Marques and Gavin Fleig, City’s head of performance analysis, wanted to work in a more creative and bespoke way, pushing the boundaries in their field.

In his role as opposition analyst, Marques became fascinated by team behaviours, the synchrony between players, space dominance and in particular passing patterns.

In his eyes, average player positions were erratic and unreliable.

A victory on one side of the world was balanced by defeat somewhere elsewhere.

By the time Marques moved to Benfica in 2018, CFG had acquired, or had a stake in, six clubs — Manchester City, New York City, Melbourne City, Yokohama Marinos, Girona, and Club Atletico Torque (now Montevideo City Torque).

CFG’s centralised structure worked and its blueprint became easier to implement with each new acquisition.

At a time when he had a young family, Benfica allowed him to return to Lisbon, his home city, and also to a senior day-to-day role in a one-club structure.

Following the news of his departure, Wilson posted a comment on LinkedIn, thanking Marques for being “a huge part of a really important chapter for MCFC/CFG” and also for how he “taught us all so much with his encyclopaedic football brain”.

Asked to elaborate on that last comment, Wilson smiles.

Pedro brought us to a different line of thinking in our defensive way.”

Intriguingly, Marques took a call from Liverpool early on during his time at Benfica, in the summer of 2019, asking for help rather than offering him a job.

Ward, who was Liverpool’s loan pathways and football partnerships manager at the time, had previously worked with Marques at Manchester City and wondered if his friend could do him a favour by bringing a team to Marbella for a practice game before the Champions League final against Tottenham Hotspur.

Marques was more than happy to oblige.
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