Athletico 100 years: Tiago Nunes, the super champion

Without fanfare, as only happens when future legends arrive at the club, the gaucho Tiago Retzlaff Nunes He arrived at Athletico in 2017. At 37 years old, he was being monitored as a promising coach by the Intelligence Department and passed a type of admission exam to be hired.

With his precocious white hair, Tiago Nunes had already played for 22 clubs in eight states before arriving at CT do Caju to initially coach the under-17 team. In a few months, former player Paulo Miranda became one of his assistants and soon, the entire technical committee was promoted to the under-20 category, which reached an unprecedented semi-final of the Brasileirão.

The following year, due to the good work, the club promoted Tiago Nunes to coach of the aspiring team and the rest, as we know, is history. Mixing base players with more experienced ones, “Cotonete” created a way of playing that would change the athletic trajectory. With Santos, Léo Pereira, Renan Lodi and Bruno Guimarães, he formed the state champion “war team”.

When Fernando Diniz was fired, Tiago took over the top team, which was in the relegation zone of the Brasileirão, and again got the job done. The interim combined the winning base built in Paranaense with more popular names, such as Pablo, Marcelo Cirino, Lucho González, Nikão and Thiago Heleno, in addition to the recently signed Rony and the promising Raphael Veiga.

This is how the gaucho helped transform an almost lost season into the unprecedented South American title, in 2018, in that dramatic penalty shootout against Junior Barranquilla, at the Arena da Baixada. The following year, two other historic achievements: the Copa do Brasil and Levain Cup, in addition to a historic 3-0 victory over Boca Juniors in the Libertadores.

With great communication skills, Tiago Nunes achieved a total connection with the red and black crowd. Even after his troubled departure at the end of 2019, he is considered the greatest coach in the club’s history by a large part of the fans.

Since then, his name has provoked a kind of “Sebastianism” in the hearts of a section of the fans. To this day, the cornunists They await the return of the white-headed commander to relive the best days of the club’s life.