Where is Cardoso Varela? How a Portuguese Prodigy's Career Went Off the Rails
After taking Portugal to the U17 Euro Championship final, Varela, 16, vanished amid dubious agents, a strange transfer request to Croatia, and an unclear Portuguese nationality claim.
In June 2024, 15-year-old Cardoso Varela had the footballing world at his feet. An Angolan-born prodigy for FC Porto, he had helped Portugal’s under-17 (U17) side to reach the final of the European Championships.
He seemed destined for a professional contract at Porto or a transfer to a big club abroad.
But instead, his family attempted to have him transferred to an amateur fourth-division club in Croatia, NK Dinamo Odranski Obrez.
Since then, Varela has disappeared for months, and his exact whereabouts are still unknown.
Varela would only turn 16 on October 29, 2024, the age at which he could sign a professional contract, and FC Porto wanted to keep him.
The team had a pre-contract with Varela until June, but negotiations to stay at the club stalled shortly after, according to an investigation by German sports magazine, Kicker.
As if that wasn't enough, the exact circumstances of how Varela obtained his Portuguese nationality are unclear.
Here is where two drastically different versions of events arise. How Cardoso Varela himself may feel is unknown. Since disappearing over the summer, his whereabouts have remained unclear, and he has never been interviewed directly.
The family’s version of events
For Varela’s entourage, made up of his father, his legal guardian named Wilson Sardinha, and an agent, Faustino Gomes, the boy had been miserable at Porto and there were threats not to take him away.
In letters to FIFA, Varela’s father, who was living in Croatia, claimed that Porto had made his son feel psychologically terrified and intimidated, and that the boy wanted to go play where his father was.
More severely, the father claimed that, in December 2023, two men approached him and said: “If your son doesn't sign a new contract with FC Porto, you will simply disappear somewhere and we will kill you,” Kicker reported. No further evidence of this threat was provided.
The Croatian club added fuel to the fire. "The parents warned us that FC Porto would cause problems with registration, but we never expected that a club as big as Porto would cause such problems, exert pressure and tarnish the name of a family, especially with a minor," Odranski Obrez wrote to the Croatian FA.
The club’s version of events
For Porto president and former Chelsea manager, André Villas-Boas, shady interests were trying to control Varela’s career in order to profit from him.
It made no sense that a player who had just shone at the U17 Euros would suddenly join a Croatian amateur side.
Villas-Boas went on the offensive. “The boy never mentioned to us that he did not feel comfortable at FC Porto. On the contrary, he often expressed to me and my staff his desire to stay at the club, but that he was afraid of his 'uncle', Mr Sardinha," Villas-Boas said.
Sardinha was allegedly appointed as Varela’s legal guardian when he arrived in Portugal as a minor, as his mother was in Angola and his father was living in different countries. According to Portuguese press reports, Varela missed meetings with FC Porto and failed his exams after dropping out of school.
As the battle went public, Porto accused the agents of seeking a three-million-euro payout to return Varela to the club. WhatsApp messages sent by Sardinha to Porto representatives support that claim, according to Kicker.
For Porto’s president, this was a flagrant case of an industry problems. Fake agents treat young players as mere assets, shuffling them around to extract personal gain, he said. He described this as a system that incentivizes people “with bad intentions” to trade in children who cannot control their own fate.
A Dubious Transfer
For Porto, the timeline and circumstances smelled suspiciously like a “bridge transfer.”
Under FIFA rules, bridge transfers—where a player is moved through an intermediary club as a stepping stone to another destination—are strictly prohibited. Such moves can allow certain parties to profit while the original club that developed the player is shortchanged.
There is significant precedent for African players moving to lower-level Croatian clubs as a stopover on the way to success. For example, Senegalese national, Mikayil Faye, spent a season at second-division NK Kustošija in 2022-2023 before moving to Barcelona and then Rennes. Malian international Baye Coulibaly 18, signed with the same club, NK Kustošija in February 2024 before moving to Crown Legacy FC in the US in December.
But Varela never played for Odranski Obrez. FIFA twice denied the Croatian club’s attempts to register him as a player. Nevertheless, he will be free to sign a contract anywhere in January 2025.
The Croatia-Barcelona Connection
By December 2024, new rumors began to circulate. According to the Barcelona fan platform Jijantes, Varela had met with Barcelona’s sporting director, Deco, alongside a new representative: the influential Croatian agent Andy Bara.
This could make sense.
Bara has been highly successful at selling players from Croatian clubs with Barcelona. He brokered the aforementioned deals for Faye and Coulibaly through NK Kustošija, a club to which Bara has close connections. He is also the agent for Spanish star, Dani Olmo, who played for Dinamo Zagreb before joining the Catalan giants.
However, Faye and Coulibaly are listed on Transfermarkt as clients of Bara’s football agency, Niagara Sports. Varela is not.
Despite Jijantes’ claim, there was no official confirmation that Barcelona officials met with Varela, and Portuguese newspaper, O Jogo, denied that these transfer rumors were real.
Questions about Varela’s Nationality
There is one more twist in the tale.
Before Varela joined Porto’s youth academy in 2022, there is little publicly available information about where he trained or developed as a footballer. He is the only member of Porto’s U15 team in 2022/2023 to have no information listed about where he was trained.
Questions have also arisen about the timing of his Portuguese citizenship, which enabled him to play for the country’s U17 team.
Records show that Varela was officially registered as a Portuguese citizen on July 6, 2022, through the Central Registry Office in Lisbon, not long before he joined Porto. The registration was made online through an Angolan lawyer, Yasmina Graça da Costa.
While Varela and his parents were born in Angola, Portuguese nationality laws allow individuals to acquire citizenship if a parent or grandparent was Portuguese or if he spent five years in the country.
There is no current evidence to show that Varela’s citizenship was improperly obtained. However, the timing of his registration as a Portuguese national, coupled with the absence of a documented playing history before arriving in the country, raises questions about the processes that brought him to Porto and into the national team.
And, through all this, the wishes and opinions of Varela have never been heard.