Teixeira, Pacheco, Carvalho & Cunha v. Vasco da Gama SAF

A Portuguese head coach, Álvaro Adriano Teixeira Pacheco, and his two assistant coaches, José Miguel Carvalho Teixeira and Pedro Valdemar Vasconcelos Pinto da Cunha Teixeira, brought three linked claims against Brazilian club Vasco da Gama after their coaching contracts ended in dispute. Pacheco had joined Vasco da Gama in 2024 after a brief, contentious spell at Portuguese club Vitória Guimarães, where he was dismissed by club president António Miguel Cardoso over a disputed trip taken shortly after Vitória had already qualified for European competition — a dismissal Pacheco went on to sue Cardoso over for defamation. He lasted only four matches at Vasco da Gama before being sacked there too, on 20 June 2024. Because all three contracts had been negotiated and signed together, as a single coaching staff package, Vasco da Gama argued this made them a prohibited "collective" or "group" employment arrangement — a structure that, if established, would have undermined the individual enforceability of each coach's own terms.

The panel rejected that characterisation. It held that contracts executed at the same time, covering people who work together as a staff, are not automatically a collective arrangement in the legally prohibited sense — what matters is whether each person's obligations and entitlements are genuinely individual, which the panel found they were here, notwithstanding the coordinated signing.

Having cleared that threshold question, the panel then had to work through a separate, more technical problem that ran across all three contracts: distinguishing between several different types of termination-related clause that are easily confused with one another but treated quite differently — liquidated damages clauses (a genuine pre-estimate of loss), penalty clauses (disproportionate and treated more sceptically), and mutual-withdrawal or buy-out mechanisms.

Decided 4 November 2025. Properly classifying which type of clause applied to each coach's contract changed how their compensation was calculated. The head coach's award was reduced on this basis, and the assistants' awards were each subject to further mitigation for income earned elsewhere afterward.