*In collaboration with Rafaela Graça In football, few figures are as decisive as the coach. It is here that the sporting strategy, the leadership of the dressing room, the management of competitive efforts and the valorization of the club's human assets converge. Even so, the football coach still does not have a specific labor legal regime, moving in a gray area between common labor law, fragmentary regulation and partially outdated conventional solutions. To better understand the reason for this structural fragility, it is important to look at the currently existing legal framework. It is true that, in the context of professional football, there is today a minimum of formal protection for coaches. The conclusion of a Collective Labor Agreement between the Portuguese Professional Football League and the National Association of Football Coaches imposes at least one clear requirement: any coach who guides a team in competitions organized by the League must be bound by an employment contract. It is, in many cases, the only anchor of legal stability in a sector marked by permanent volatility. It is true that this (minimal) protection ends almost as quickly as it begins. Outside the world of professional football, the scenario changes drastically. In non-professional championships, the coach often appears without a solid contractual framework. In the best case scenario, a service provision contract is concluded. In most situations, training becomes an exercise of pure personal dedication, an activity carried out after work, without remuneration, and, often, without any guarantee. We live by the romantic idea that 'those who run for pleasure never get tired'. This is where the central question arises: what, after all, is the legal regime applicable to football coaches? The answer is uncomfortable in its simplicity. There is no specific regime! National courts have expressed clear difficulties in the legal qualification of existing employment relationships, hesitating between the application of the Labor Code and the Legal Regime of the Sports Practitioner's Employment Contract (enshrined in Law no. 54/2017, of July 14), despite it being clear that the coach is not the practitioner, but the one who directs him. Just read article 1 of this diploma to understand the problem: the legislator was clear in limiting its scope to sports practitioners, training contracts and sports entrepreneurs. The coach, a central figure in the sporting phenomenon, was left out. Given this exclusion, the legal solution found is anything but satisfactory. Using the general rules of the Civil Code, the regime that 'closest' to the coach's reality is applied by analogy, adapting the sports employment contract to what is compatible with the exercise of his activity and, in a subsidiary way, the Labor Code. This is a forced legal construction, based on normative patches, which clearly exposes the absence of a clear and coherent legislative option. The reality is that the coach develops his activity in defined competitive cycles, works predominantly according to the sporting calendar, provides regular work on weekends and holidays, adjusts holidays, rest periods and working hours to the logic of the competition itself. Their remuneration, in turn, is often structured into fixed and variable components, dependent on sporting and financial objectives, in a logic that common labor law hardly accommodates. Within the scope of this reflection, another unavoidable question arises: isn't it time to legally recognize, in a clear way, all the professionals who make football happen on a daily basis? We believe that in today's football these issues do not end with the head coach. Football is built as a team, also outside the pitch. The main coach's so-called 'technical team' - made up of assistant coaches, physical trainers, goalkeeper coaches, analysts and their assistants who are specialists in performance and recovery - works silently, but decisively, in the preparation, performance and preservation of the athletes throughout the season. And yet, many of these functions remain legally invisible. The evolution of football was not accompanied by an adequate legislative response, leaving many of the professionals who, behind the scenes, sustain the teams' performance without protection and recognition. Take, for example, at the international level, where FIFA sought to densify the concept of coach, the problem does not disappear completely. By defining the coach based on job functions consisting of training and guiding players and decisions directly linked to the game, the regulations recognize some, but continue to leave others out. Physical trainers, analysts, performance or recovery specialists remain excluded and without adequate legal protection, despite playing a decisive role in the daily functioning of teams. We therefore continue to demand professionalism, responsibility and results from those who operate within a fragmented, incomplete and, in many cases, improvised legal framework.