Ian Cathro reckons there's not much difference between football in Europe and Saudi Arabia - and warned Jota he'll need to work hard to earn his meteoric wages.
The Portuguese winger sealed a £25m move from Celtic on Monday and is set to take home £10m a year at Al-Ittihad. He teams up with Karim Benzema and N'Golo Kante at the Saudi Pro League champs and will go toe to toe with a growing cast of top talent which includes Cristiano Ronaldo, Ruben Neves and Roberto Firmino while in the Middle East.
But former Hearts boss Cathro, who is Nuno Espirito Santo's right hand man in Jeddah, says it's not just the bulging list of superstars who will make it challenging. He says the intense schedule and travelling will take some getting used to and warned the forward he cannot take his foot off the gas and expect to thrive.
Cathro told the Sun: “From the team’s point of view I think it’s exciting for the squad. But I’ve got to tell you, the life we’re going to live this coming season is going to be tough. It’s playing games every three days with lots of travel.
“This is the thing, obviously there is huge investment going on in the league right now and that tells its own story. But when you’re actually in the thick of it, doing what we’re doing with the amount of games we have ahead of us, it’s going to be a very, very intense season for everyone involved, there is no question about that.
“We’re going to play in the Asian Champions League and the Club World Cup. These are really exciting prospects. With that in mind the club is developing and investing in the squad to go and take on those challenges. That’s what the supporters want to see and it must be great for them.
“But for the squad it will be play and recover, play and recover. That’s the same as players in Europe, it’s just that the competitions have different names. It’s the same life otherwise.
“It sounds different and the conditions are different with the heat, but when you get on a plane and land there the reality of day to day life as a professional is the same.”
Cathro is a realistic enough to know players in Europe aren't yet growing up with the dream of winning the Saudi Pro League. But he kept an open mind to link up with long-term colleague Santo in the Middle East and has no regrets with the passionate nature of the fans winning him over.
He went on: "Listen, I’m not going to pretend. I didn’t grow up as a kid dreaming of winning the Saudi Professional League, I just didn’t. We grew up with different ambitions, in a certain way, surrounded by different things.
“You’re a product of your environment and that’s perfectly fine and completely normal. But one of the things I’ve been fortunate enough to have in my life is a desire to get outside of that and to see other things and learn from other things.
“I want to experience different things and have different challenges. But I’m very, very aware that football is played all over the world.
“And as much as we Scots may look at how things happen in a certain part of the world, I can assure you there are people on the other side of that looking back the way, maybe at us, and thinking other things. At the end of the say football happens the world over and people’s love for it and passion for it is often the same.”
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