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WORDS Chris Burke PHOTOGRAPHY Kristy Sparow

Say what you will about Thomas Frank, but the former Tottenham Hotspur coach certainly lives up to his name. And among the Dane’s various nuggets of honesty during his brief time in north London, his reaction to a 5-3 loss away to Paris Saint-Germain last November was especially frank. “They have one Ballon d’Or winner and I think the next one is playing in midfield,” he cooed. “Vitinha… Wow, what a player!”

Paris team-mate Ousmane Dembélé currently holds the Ballon d’Or title, but no player is more fundamentally plugged into the European champions’ slick machine than the 26-year-old furiously pulling the levers and pressing the buttons in midfield. Or, to borrow from the lexicon of French football – where the metaphors tend to lean more musical than mechanical – Vitinha is their “métronome”, their “chef d’orchestre” (orchestra conductor), their “maestro”.

Art and craft. Class and graft. However you spin it, the Portuguese international makes Luis Enrique’s side tick. Just take a look at the passing stats in this season’s Champions League. Heading into the semi-finals, Vitinha topped the list for completed passes with an astonishing 1,376 from 14 games, averaging out at nearly 100 every match. No one else had even broken the 1,000-pass barrier. And while we’re admiring the numbers, note too that he sat joint-seventh for ball recoveries, with no midfielders placed higher.

How did we get here? Rewind five years and Vitinha had just completed a season-long loan at Wolverhampton Wanderers and was finding his feet back at Porto, the Premier League club having declined the Dragões’ €20m asking price. Today, having bossed last year’s Champions League final against Inter Milan, he is valued at more than five times that figure.

Recall too that it was far from smooth sailing in his debut campaign with Paris after joining in 2022. Despite initially settling well under then coach Christophe Galtier, his form dipped in the second half of the season – and he was not alone, Vitinha and Co getting knocked out of the Champions League in the round of 16, losing to arch-rivals Marseille in the French Cup and winning the league by a single point compared to their usual dominant fashion. Now, three years later, he takes to the pitch as a man ranked third in the 2025 Ballon d’Or vote – and tipped to go higher.

“Obviously, it would be such a mistake if I hadn’t grown and improved in many ways and become a better person and player over the course of these four years,” he tells Champions Journal. “The truth is that I can feel it. If you ask me to reflect on the Vitinha of 2022 compared to now, I feel that I’ve developed in both respects and I’m happy about that. It’s true that it’s very important, and I keep close to my heart the trophies I’ve won with the club, but even more important than that is what I’ve become and what I’m still becoming, because it’s a process. I feel very happy with everything I’ve become here at Paris Saint-Germain.”