Pepe sends him

There were only seconds until the final whistle of the game against Rasenballsport Leipzig when Diogo Leite got a little cocky. The central defender of 1. FC Union dribbled, played a bad pass on the center line and enabled the opponent to make a final attack. It remained 2-1 for the Berliners, but Leite was also able to feel addressed when his coach Urs Fischer said that such a narrow lead had to be managed more cleverly.

This was a minor blemish on an otherwise impressively mature performance. Leite, who came to Union this summer in the middle of preparation and with a clear training deficit, was in the starting XI in all three Bundesliga games and is already surprisingly well integrated. “I work every day to learn how it works here as quickly as possible,” Leite said at a media panel.

At first glance it is surprising how quickly the 23-year-old Portuguese has found his way into the mostly perfectly orchestrated processes in the Berlin defensive. But if you look back a few years, it is rather surprising that a man like Leite plays for Union at all. When the Berliners finally fought for promotion to the Bundesliga in the 2018/19 season, Leite made his debut in the Champions League for FC Porto.

Two years earlier he had won the European Championship with the Portuguese U17s, converting a penalty in the final. As a regular player with the U21s, he narrowly missed out on winning the European Championship last year and lost in the final to the German team with his current teammates Paul Jaeckel and Lennart Grill. A station at Union was certainly not on Leite’s career plan until recently, who has played almost continuously at the big FC Porto since he was nine years old.

A typical Oliver Ruhnert transfer

His signing is a typical Union transfer. In recent years, manager Oliver Ruhnert and his team have regularly found excellent players for little money who had not fully exploited their potential in the recent past (Max Kruse, Taiwo Awoniyi) or were not sufficiently appreciated by their clubs (Robin Knoche, Rani Khedira). At Leite, the risk for Union is minimal. After Timo Baumgartl was diagnosed with testicular cancer and initially had very uncertain downtime, the Berliners came up with a highly valuable replacement for a rental fee of around 500,000 euros. Union has a purchase option of 7.5 million euros next summer, according to Portuguese media reports.

However, Leite does not want to talk about his future on Tuesday. His focus is solely on the present and he is by no means surprised at the outstanding start to the season with seven points from three games. “I knew from the start that we have a good team with a good spirit,” he says in English. Leite has already completed a few German lessons in the five weeks since his move, but the vocabulary is primarily football-specific: “Play and go”, “other side” – the small talk will have to wait for a while.

Nevertheless, Leite already feels very comfortable at his first station outside of Portugal. He had never been further away than Braga, 50 kilometers from Porto and his footballing home last season. But he likes Berlin very much. “The first time abroad is also a good challenge to grow,” says Leite.

Diogo Felipe Monteiro Pinto Leite, to give him his full name, started playing football at the small suburban club Leixoes SC. At that time he was still playing as a winger. “I was the top scorer,” says Leite, but he’s not really angry with those responsible at FC Porto for pushing him further and further down the field after he moved to the youth department of the four-time European Cup winner. “It was the best decision,” he says.

As a central defender, he quickly developed into one of the country’s greatest talents and was an integral part of the youth national teams. At Porto, he played for the professional team early on and was taken under the wing of old master Pepe, whom he also cites as his role model. “I was very young and learned a lot from him,” says Leite. In Germany, Pepe has the image of the brutal kicker, but that doesn’t do him justice. “A central defender must also be aggressive,” says Leite. Pepe has good aggressiveness and taught him a lot about the art of defending. “He knows when to wait and when to attack and off the pitch he’s quite a nice person.”

What is probably the greatest praise for Leite comes from Pepe, who is now 39 years old, but so far he has not lived up to it. In an interview in 2019, Pepe said of his team-mate: “For me, Leite is Portugal’s best central defender.” These words motivated him a lot at the time, says Leite. “I know I’m not at my best right now, but I’m young and I can still improve.”