Matilde Faria Biography

Matilde Faria has been with celebrated football coach José Mourinho since they were teenagers. They also got married before he earned fame on the football field. Matilde has been his pillar of support since those early days, and José has never shied away from acknowledging that. She has basked in the limelight throughout his illustrious career and has earned a place for herself as a humanitarian socialite.

Matilde Faria and José Mourinho are from the same neighborhood in Setubal, Portugal and lived merely one street apart from each other. The couple grew close during their teenage years and began dating soon after. After a few years of dating, they finally got married in 1989, before they even turned 18. She gave birth to their first child, a daughter also named Matilde, in 1996. Four years later, they welcomed their only son, José Mário, Jr. While Faria and her daughter both share the same name, Fari is called 'Tami' by friends and family members, while her daughter is known by the nickname Tita. Her daughter is an emerging fashion model who is a close friend of One Direction star Niall Horan. Her son plays football for Fulham's youth team. Due to their father's job, her two children grew up shifting from one place to another and have lived in Portugal, Italy, Spain and the UK. Both she and her husband are practicing Catholics and raised their children as such.

While Matilde Faria and her husband José Mourinho have been married for nearly three decades, they have been dragged into controversies several times in the past due to rumors of José Mourinho’s alleged infidelity. In 2007, soon after he was fired from Chelsea, 'The Sun' had reported that José had an affair with a woman named Elsa Sousa. In an interview, she shared intimate details about the affair mentioning how he fed her chocolate-chip cookies while listening to Bryan Adams’ 'Everything I Do, I Do It For You'. Both José and Matilde claimed that the allegations were made up.

Later in 2010, another controversy arose after a Kenyan woman named Lelesit Silvana claimed that she had an affair with him when he visited Diani, Kenya, and that the two even had romantic holiday trips to Poland several times. Furthermore, she claimed that he was ready to divorce his wife and had offered her marriage. Once again, Matilde and her husband denied any such claims without getting into any detail. However, José got the opportunity to prove his love and loyalty to his wife when she had to undergo an emergency operation in late December 2016. He rushed from London to Lisbon in a private jet twice in two days to be by her side at Hospital De Sao José, a private clinic within the state-run Royal Lisboa Hospital, where she was being treated. According to a report by 'The Sun', the operation was due to complications from a previous operation, supposedly for cancer, which was initially thought to be a success. However, she often complained about pain, and before Christmas, was diagnosed with greater problems that required immediate surgery. José flew to Lisbon on December 28th, and returned back to Manchester later that day. Following a training session with his team in the morning of December 29th, he again came to visit his wife and returned the same day so that he could hold press conference the next day.

Later, while having a busy day in Manchester with his colleague Ricardo Formosinho in August 2017, he made an Instagram post of him holding a picture of his wife, who was back in London with their kids, and wished her 'Happy Birthday' in Portuguese. His devotion towards his wife, as well as his love for his family, is sure to put infidelity rumors to rest.

Matilde Faria was born in the South African nation of Angola, where her parents were working as humanitarian aid workers. She was raised in the coastal town of Setúbal in Portugal.