Eight matches, eight wins. A trip to Madeira that should have been a banana skin ended with an 18-year-old Pole curling a winner into the top corner and Francesco Farioli’s Porto walking off with their 100 per cent start intact. Marítimo 1-2 Porto was not a classic, and Porto did not play especially well for long stretches of it, which is exactly why it matters. The reigning champions are now winning the games that a season ago they would have drawn, and the rest of the Primeira Liga is beginning to understand what that means.
The Dragons keep finding a way
The afternoon at the Barreiros began badly. Gábor Szalai tried his luck from distance and Diogo Costa, one of the most reliable goalkeepers in Europe, misjudged the bounce and watched it roll into the corner. It was the kind of error that used to derail Porto away from home, and for a quarter of an hour Marítimo, back in the top flight and desperate for a result after five league games without a win, believed they could hold on.
They could not. Porto pressed the Madeiran side back relentlessly, and shortly before half-time Victor Froholdt reacted quickest after Fran Vieites had tipped Francisco Moura’s header away, stabbing in the equaliser. The numbers tell the story of the second half: 19 shots to seven, an expected goals count of 2.32 against 0.20, and a Spanish goalkeeper in Vieites who was busy enough to be named the home side’s best player by some distance.
Then came the moment. Oskar Pietuszewski had been on the pitch for barely ten minutes, replacing Pepê, when his compatriot Jakub Kiwior lofted a long diagonal over the Marítimo defence. The teenager took it down, cut away from goal, twisted his marker inside out and lashed a shot past Vieites into the far top corner. VAR checked for offside, and for a long minute the away end held its breath. The flag stayed down. Porto had their eighth win from eight, and Farioli had another reason to trust a player he signed in January and has been easing into the side ever since. That patience, rather than any single tactical tweak, may be the most underrated part of his second season.
It was also notable who did not start. Santi Giménez, the Mexican striker whose confidence has been the subject of pointed comments from his coach, began on the bench. Porto’s attack right now does not depend on any single forward. It depends on a system that generates chances regardless of personnel, and that is a far more dangerous proposition for the teams chasing them.
Why this start feels different
Porto’s title win last season was built on a similarly whirlwind start alongside a resilient run-in, with Pietuszewski starring in the second half of the campaign and a comeback victory in Braga effectively settling the race. What has changed since then is the margin for error. Through seven matches Porto had scored 18 goals and conceded three. They had already beaten Benfica 3-1 at the Dragão in September, a match remembered for Clément Lenglet’s red card as much as for the quality of the home side’s performance. By the time the international break arrived, Farioli’s team had a cushion and a swagger.
The two Lisbon clubs are not collapsing, which makes Porto’s consistency more impressive rather than less. Sporting went to the Quarry on Friday night, fell behind, and came back to beat Braga 3-1. Benfica, stung by the defeat in the Clássico, responded with a 2-0 home win over Vitória de Guimarães in which Samuel Dahl and Georgiy Sudakov scored and Marco Silva complained in his post-match press conference about wasted chances. Both results were good. Neither moved the needle, because Porto simply keep winning.
Silva’s comment after the Guimarães match was revealing. “Today I convinced them because I won; tomorrow I have to convince them again,” he said of the Luz crowd. That is the posture of a coach under pressure in October, which should not be possible at a club of Benfica’s size. It is possible because the team at the top has given nobody a weekend off.
The price of certainty
Portuguese football has long had a comfortable relationship with its bookmakers. The Liga itself carries the Betclic name, the shirts carry sponsors from the sector, and the weekly ritual of checking the odds before a Clássico is as much a part of fan culture as the pre-match francesinha. What a start like Porto’s does is drain the drama out of the outright market. When the champions are winning every week, the title price shortens to the point where there is little value left in backing them and a great deal of risk in backing anyone else. The interesting markets shift elsewhere, to individual matches, to first goalscorers, to whether a teenager like Pietuszewski might start the next one.
That shift mirrors what has happened across the wider online gambling industry in the Portuguese-speaking and Spanish-speaking markets. Operators have discovered that a sports bettor who finds the football market uninteresting on a given Saturday does not necessarily log off. They move across to the casino lobby, and roulette in particular has become the game of choice for players who want something quicker than a 90-minute wait. Sites such as casinoonlineruleta.com exist precisely because of that crossover audience, explaining the differences between European and American wheels, how live dealer tables work, and which bonuses are worth claiming, for players who arrived through sport and stayed for the tables.
None of this is without its complications. Portugal’s regulator, the SRIJ, has tightened advertising rules in recent years, and the debate about how visibly gambling brands should sit alongside the national game is not going away. Supporters’ groups have raised the question of whether clubs have become too dependent on sector money, while the industry argues that regulated operators are a safer option than the offshore alternatives. Whichever side of that argument you are on, a league where one team wins every week makes the economics harder for everyone, because a predictable title race is a less marketable product.
What can stop them
The obvious answer is Europe. Porto are back in the Champions League and the midweek fixtures will begin to bite as the autumn goes on. Farioli’s squad is deeper than it was a year ago, but it is not so deep that a run of Tuesday-Saturday-Tuesday cycles will leave it untouched. The question is whether the coach, who built his reputation at Nice and Ajax on tactical flexibility, can rotate without losing the rhythm that has carried the team through eight domestic matches.
The second answer is the thing that nearly cost them in Madeira. Diogo Costa’s mistake was an outlier, but Porto’s willingness to concede first and chase games is a habit they would be wise to break before the Clássicos in Lisbon. Against Marítimo, the comeback was comfortable because the opposition’s threat was negligible. Against Sporting at Alvalade, giving away the first goal would be a different kind of problem.
The third is simply regression. No team sustains an expected goals difference like Porto’s across a full season, and at some point the finishing will cool, a goalkeeper will have a night like Vieites did and the save will come at the right end. Eight from eight is not a guarantee. It is a statement of intent, and it has left Sporting and Benfica playing catch-up before the clocks have even gone back.
A teenager’s season
The lasting image from the weekend, though, is of Pietuszewski wheeling away in front of the travelling supporters. Signed from Jagiellonia Białystok with a modest profile, he has become the player Porto turn to when a game needs unlocking. He is 18. His decision-making in that moment, the touch to control a difficult ball, the patience to cut inside rather than snatch at the shot, was that of a player who has been doing this for years.
Portuguese football has always exported talent, but the modern Porto model also imports it young and sells it on at a premium. If the Polish winger keeps producing winners in October, the questions about his future will arrive long before the season ends. For now, Farioli will be content to keep him in the squad, keep the points coming and keep the rest of the league wondering how, exactly, they are supposed to catch a team that has not yet dropped a point.
