Armando Sá ⭑ From A-Z since '92

This is part of my (eight year long, it'll fly by) attempt to write about every Leeds United player since 1992. For more about why I'm doing this, go back to Aapo Halme, and to read all the players so far, browse the archive here.

In 2007 Leeds United were too busy getting relegated to take much notice of Armando Sá, who in turn was lacking enough fitness to solve the problem Gary Kelly's lack of fitness was causing at right-back. Kelly had injured his back in November, and before he was back he'd injured his ankle. Frazer Richardson, Rui Marques, Hayden Foxe and Jonathan Douglas all tried filling in until the January transfer window opened and Sá arrived, on a short term contract, from Espanyol. It was hoped that his quality would help Leeds avoid relegation to League One. But it also made it easier to sell central defender Matt Kilgallon to Neil Warnock's Sheffield United, which had the opposite effect.

Sá's own effect was limited. He'd been out of favour at Espanyol since Ernesto Valverde took over as manager, and at 31 years old, he didn't have the fitness for the Championship. "When I arrived in England I had no rhythm," Sá told Tribuna Expresso in 2018. "We all know that English football is tough, it's super aggressive. I played my first few games, I got into the team well, but then I started to suffer physically. I started to get muscle injuries and I couldn't keep up with the pace. I wasn't physically ready."

His debut was an FA Cup third round defeat, 3-1 at West Brom, followed by his league debut, a 3-2 defeat at home, to West Brom. He played pretty much all of a win at Hull and a defeat at Norwich, then came on as a sub in a win over Crystal Palace that had manager Dennis Wise apoplectic that someone had 'leaked' his team — erroneously, it turned out, with Sá listed as starting. Sá did start the next two games, a defeat to Cardiff — in which he handled for a penalty that Casper Ankergren saved — and a goalless draw with QPR, but it was in the latter game that his hamstring started giving way. He played one more full game, a 1-1 draw at Leicester, and limped through some sporadic appearances from the bench. "There is no good news coming out of the treatment room," Wise observed in March, as he tried to count his fit players. "Then I send on Armando Sá as a substitute against Birmingham and he pulls a hamstring."

Sá, for his part, has nothing bad to say about the experience, other than his legs couldn't handle it and he wished he could have stayed longer after bluffing his way through his first few days. "They asked me if I spoke English, I said yes. When I got to the press conference, it wasn't English, it was British (accents — and quite likely Phil Hay). I didn't understand a thing! But then I started going to the cinema. I also watched a lot of films at home, without translation of course, and I started to get into their way of speaking.

"I had support, I even had a song they sang in the stadium," he said in 2018. "The guys are very passionate about football. I would have liked to have played there longer, to have had a career in England. On the pitch you have to give everything, off the pitch they don't even care who you are. They don't get too involved in your life. I remember going out, going to pubs, to the shopping centre, for a walk, and they didn't care."

That was important to Sá, because although he wasn't well known in Leeds, in Portugal and Spain he felt the public knew too much about him. While playing for Rio Ave as a 21-year-old he met his future wife, Tania, in a nightclub and saw her again at a game against Maritimo. He thought she was a local football enthusiast and they dated for a while until, in a scene from a sitcom, she asked him to meet her family. "I'm in the lounge and the Marítimo coach comes in," Sá says, "and I'm like, wait a minute, what's going on here? 'Oh, it's my dad'." Dad in this case was Augusto Inácio, a former Portuguese international left-back who won the European Cup with Porto, played at the 1986 World Cup, a manager with a large public profile. That meant a lot of interest when Sá became his son-in-law, particularly after Inácio took over at Sporting and won the Primeira Liga.