Roger Schmidt has raved about the greatness of his club Benfica Lisbon after winning the Portuguese championship.
“Benfica is a way of life for many people, even outside of Portugal,” said the 56-year-old in an interview with Dutch daily AD. “The feeling for the club is lived extremely intensively by the people.” Benfica is still one of the football clubs with the most members in the world.
But that doesn’t protect Portugal’s record champions from the financially strong competition, which keeps poaching the best players from the Champions League quarter-finalists. At first, Schmidt could hardly believe that Argentinian world champion Enzo Fernández switched to Chelsea last winter thanks to a €120 million release clause.
“We thought that our luck would be this clause and that’s why he would stay until the summer because nobody would be crazy enough to pay that amount at that time,” said the former Bundesliga coach. “But we didn’t count on Chelsea.”