Matheus Nunes interview: How the Man City joker finally became Cafunes

To be fair, most agreed with him after a disastrous start. He had done okay at left-back for 87 minutes against one of the poorest United sides in recent memory in late 2024, but then gave away a penalty as he covered the right-back area and City ended up losing another game horribly in what was an excruciating run for a team coming on the back of four consecutive league titles.

Nunes disappeared from the squad for a month after what he considers his lowest point at the club, and even when he was tried again it wasn’t enough to allow him to feel comfortable.

“I’m not going to lie, individually I would say this is probably the most difficult game,” he said of the December derby. “When you do mistakes as a midfielder, you would never affect the game like the effect of that one.

“I did one mistake and it led to a goal, and then you end up losing the game and that’s all you think in your head, you know? But it was not only that, it was me coming to a place where it was uncomfortable for me, a position where it was uncomfortable for me, not being able to accept it, because I wasn’t accepting it.

“In my head, ‘I’m not a full-back. I’m not a full-back’. That’s all I was thinking about. And yeah, I mean, it was difficult. You said six months, but I didn’t play every single game, you know what I mean? But [last] season I played every single game, and then it’s different.

“Even if I was playing, for example, one game, and then I would be five games on the bench and then I would play again as a full-back, it’s six months in total, but you played maybe 10 games or you played 15 games. So yeah, I didn’t have the consistency that I wanted to actually be comfortable in this position and to change my head around.

“I spoke to so many people. I have a psychologist, I spoke to my friends. I would tell my friends all the time, ‘I’m not a full-back, I’m not a full-back’. And they would always say, no, but you play so good there, you play so good. The team-mates, Bernardo and Ruben, were so annoying all the time as well, they were in my head constantly as well, ‘You were good there, you were good there. You need to accept it.’ And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All the time.

“But at a certain point you just have to see what the people are saying. You can’t be denying it for the rest of your life. If you do, maybe you miss your chance. And if I did that I would have missed it. So yeah, listening to everyone then actually seeing Pep during training and before the games as well, the way he believed in me once I changed to that position, I felt there was a bit of a difference also in the way that we interacted with each other after I played there.

“I don’t know, this stuff, you just feel it, it’s not something that I can explain. I just feel it. And once you start seeing all of this stuff, it changes the mindset. It was not easy, of course, but I had a decision to make: do I want to play or do I not want to play? And I wanted to play.

“Now I feel like a full-back. There is no difference for me, playing as a midfielder or a full-back.”

The Club World Cup last summer was pivotal for Nunes to make the switch in his mind. He had more than one game where he felt able to get into attacking areas and influence the game like he had done from midfield, and while the two roles are not so similar the Portugal international began to stop feeling like full-back prevented him from doing what he wanted to do.

As the 27-year-old began to accept that higher cost of mistakes as a defender but also get better in that area, he grew happier. And not only did that help the team on the pitch but the dressing room found that one of its jokers could laugh even louder.

Nunes knew Silva and Dias through Portugal and had instantly clicked with John Stones on account of them both being wind-up merchants. He is somebody who loves to laugh and joke, keeping an extra eye on the fixture list so he can remember to ‘p*** off’ his Sunderland-supporting dad if they have a row.

But he found it difficult to fully clown around while he struggled to accept his role in the team, so learning to love right-back was liberating. And yes, he does know all about the Cafunes nickname given to him that has become popular in and out of the dressing room.

“This started with Bernardo, actually! When I was playing as a winger, he would call me Thierry Henry. Then I played as a full back and he called me Cafu. It was different people giving me different nicknames in the club. My friends started calling it me as well and I had to accept it.

“I would say the three of us [with Stones and Silva] are the jokers of the team. It’s always good to have a laugh — what’s the point of life if you’re not having a laugh? And these are the people that you spend most of your time with, you spend more time with these guys than with your family.

“Sometimes you get sick of them because you see them so many times. And if you don’t have a good environment, there’s no point in being there, you don’t want to be working in a place where the vibe is not good. I just try to do that, and trying to be happy. I’m not trying anything, actually. I’m just being myself, and then I end up being a clown sometimes. It’s just the way it is.”

Having battled with Guardiola over his position, Nunes noticed that the manager changed towards him when he embraced the right-back role. Regular conversations with Guardiola and his assistants Kolo Toure and Pep Lijnders helped him to hone the role and he became one of the manager’s most used players, with only Erling Haaland getting more minutes than him last season.

Nunes grew so close to Guardiola that even two months after the day he found out he was leaving there is a wobble in his voice as he describes the moment. The manager had gathered them all in a meeting room at the training ground in the final week of the season and put a video on of everything that they had all achieved together over the past 10 years complete with candid speeches and conversations from the inner sanctum of the Etihad.

“It was unexpected. We thought there was a chance of him leaving but until he actually says it you don’t know if it’s going to happen.” he said. “He spoke to us in the auditorium and it was a very emotional day. A lot of people were crying. It’s very hard to say goodbye to someone who gave so much to us all.

“Someone who put the club to a level that seems unreachable again. What he did was unbelievable. It is difficult to talk about. I remember in that day, when you start to see everything on the screen, it becomes real that he is leaving. It didn’t seem real. It felt weird and awkward to actually have to believe it. A lot of things are going to change. I’ve never been in the club without him. Stuff like this. It’s never easy to say goodbye.”

City had to move on, and Nunes is now one of the senior players in what has become a significantly younger squad over the last 18 months. There are only a handful of players who won the Treble that are reunited with new boss Enzo Maresca, with Nunes part of the 2023 intake that must now set the standards in the squad.

Despite that, the importance of jokers in a dressing room never goes away and the former Wolves star has even more on his shoulders with the departures of Stones and Silva. Nunes will continue to set standards on the pitch, particularly given the club have decided against signing a right-back this summer, but he will also remind his teammates of the message that has helped him win trophies and successfully adapt a new role.

“It’s not the change that worried me. Even ourselves, you have to remember what they have done. When you think about it, it is almost impossible to win six Premier Leagues in 10 years. This is not normal and people forget that,” he said.

“City is such a huge club and you think, ‘ah City is going to win every year’ but Liverpool is a big club, United, Arsenal, Chelsea are big clubs. They all think the same. It’s never easy. You need to be perfect at a lot of levels. We have to remind ourselves. We’re going to try, we’re always going to try and will give our best but sometimes football is just one detail. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t win.

“I recently saw a basketball player [Giannis Antetokounmpo] asked: ‘Do you look at this season as a failure because you didn’t win the championship?’ He said that if you go to work and don’t get a promotion, is that a failure? It’s not like you work the whole season for one goal and if not it’s a failure. Sometimes you have to go through a year or two of not winning to get to the win. Maybe it will be different [for us], who knows? Maybe it won’t. The club deserves us to try.”