“I saw U2 in Vilar de Mouros in 1982 and I saw the Cure there too. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions also did a very good concert. But there is more.” Carlos Carvalhal draws breath. “I remember Simple Minds, Echo and the Bunnymen, Nina Hagen, Elvis Costello and Duran Duran. And the best concert I ever saw was the Rolling Stones, in the stadium of Sporting Lisbon.”

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The former Swansea and Sheffield Wednesday manager had been told this interview might touch on what he likes to do when not at work, and he has come prepared. He has written down all his favourite gigs on a pad, as well as all his favourite bands and the influences that led him to them. He has thoughts on the similarities between gigs and football matches too. “Usually a band plays like a team; they want to entertain the people,” he says. “For the people, they need catharsis and concerts give that to them, like football does. I think it’s not too much different.”

Carvalhal is in the UK to put himself about a bit. The 52-year-old has been without a job since he left the Liberty Stadium in the summer. After a few months helping care for his father (now on the mend), Carvalhal is back in London. “When you are out, it’s a good opportunity for people to know you better,” he says. “When you are working, I must tell you, if someone wants to talk to me, to 99.9% I say no.”

Play Video 2:28 Carlos Carvalhal best Swansea quotes: 'Sardines can become sea bass'– video

So as a way of getting to know the person, we start with music. Carvalhal is a keen gig goer and a fan of new wave music. “I like music more balanced between the voice and the guitar and the percussion,” he says. “I don’t like heavy metal.” During his time in Sheffield, he made the acquaintance of much of the city’s rock royalty, including the Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner (he also knows Tim Booth from the band James who, it turns out, are massive in Portugal).

It’s not just a hobby. Music is a thread woven through Carvalhal’s life. Raised in Braga, he did not have a wealthy upbringing but earned a scholarship to the Gulbenkian conservatoire, a school that specialised in the intensive study of music and the fine arts.

When I presented my thesis to the jury, they gave me 19 out of 20. They said I should publish it as a book

“I started at age five, when the usual age was six,” Carvalhal says. “I would walk five kilometres each day to get there. I was not very musical but I would ask my friends in class and they would explain. I grew up in this environment for six years. I was surrounded by classical music, art and ballet all these things. But they also had a football field and it was at the conservatoire I decided to be a footballer.”

By the age of 15 Carvalhal was going to gigs but he had begun to play for Portugal at youth level. The influence of the conservatoire lingered. He would travel to Lisbon for training and take his books, studying as he played. His friend Paolo Futre called him “the doctor”. By the time Carvalhal left school he had not only turned professional with his home-town club but had begun a degree studying sports science at university. It was there he was taught by Vítor Frade.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Carlos Carvalhal, pictured here during his time as Swansea manager, is weighing up an offer to do a PhD on genetics in football. Photograph: Dan Mullan/Getty Images

Tactical periodisation is a methodology for coaching football which breaks down the barriers between physical, technical and tactical conditioning. Used, among others, by José Mourinho, it was invented by Frade. “He put us to study a lot of things,” says Carvalhal of his time under Frade. “For example to do my thesis I had to study chaos theory, complexity and systems theory. When I presented my thesis to the jury, they gave me 19 out of 20. They didn’t give me 20 because I had some problems with my Portuguese. They said I should publish it as a book and they would keep it in the university library. So I finished university with a football specialism. Then, at 32 years old, I started as a manager.”

Carvalhal has gone on to hold 17 managerial posts in 20 years, from the Portuguese third division to the Turkish Super Lig and then England. He wants another job in this country, preferably in the Premier League. “When you achieve in England, you are at the top,” he says. But he retains the values he learned from the conservatoire and from Frade. They have fostered a lifelong passion for learning (he is, he says, weighing up an offer to do a PhD on genetics in football). As a manager, it was the idea of complexity and inter-connectedness that stuck.

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“The problem nowadays is that we are doing everything to isolate the players,” he says. “With the PT [personal training] and the data, to the GPS, we do everything to make them like individual machines. It’s a scientific approach, from Descartes, that if we study the particulars of the phenomenon, then we know it better. But complexity proves it is completely wrong. By isolating the individual you do not understand the whole. Football is a collective game. A collective game is made by connections. Connections, you don’t have any machine that can evaluate those.”