Andre Cunha has worked with Arsenal centre-back Gabriel for two years.
“He’s grown so much as a player,” Cunha tells The Athletic. “The first thing is his mindset. He changed it so much, it’s crazy. The first day I was with him, I said, ‘You need to change your attitude, to change the game’. It all starts there.”
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Cunha is the chief executive of Volt Sport Science — a health and performance company that provides Gabriel with a holistic, individualised programme to help him maximise his potential.
“He’s so professional right now,” says Cunha. “He’s so focused, so driven. And so the pain has started to decrease. When you have less pain, you can express more force. You can play more. You can jump higher. You can score more goals!”
Gabriel plays more than most. Last season, he did not miss a single Premier League game through injury. Across all competitions, only his centre-back partner William Saliba played more minutes for Arsenal. Gabriel also scored four goals in 2023-24. Since his debut in September 2020, no defender has scored more than Gabriel’s 14 league goals. Whatever the 26-year-old Brazilian is doing, it is working.
“Everything is extremely connected with Arsenal,” explains Gabriel. “What we do outside of the training ground is all about supporting what happens there, and details.”
For Gabriel, there is no great secret to the work he is doing. “I feel less pain and I recover faster,” the Brazil international tells The Athletic. “This allows me to train and prepare myself better for matches.”
At the start of his career, Cunha worked across a variety of sports: tennis, mixed martial arts, rugby, swimming and others. In his native Brazil, he started a company called 4Perform, based on the four pillars of performance: nutrition, psychology, physiotherapy and training.
That was all to change in 2018, when Cunha received a phone call from Gabriel Jesus, who had recently moved to England with Manchester City. “He called me and said, ‘I want you to come to Manchester and be my private strength and conditioning coach’,” explains Cunha. “I said, ‘OK, give me two days to think about it’, because it was a big change.
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“I did my research, and then I called him back. I said, ‘I don’t think you need a private strength and conditioning coach. First of all, you are a genetically gifted athlete for what you do. And secondly, you are playing at City — the NASA of football. But you called me, so I know you need something. So I have a project for you: I want to be your performance manager’.”
That meant taking charge of every facet of Jesus’ performance routine: mindset, lifestyle, sleep, training, nutrition and recovery. The striker agreed, and together Jesus and Cunha enjoyed a fruitful five-year relationship.
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When Jesus eventually moved to Arsenal, the buying club naturally had questions over Cunha’s role. “Arsenal called City,” Cunha explains. “All the staff from City said, ‘If you want to get the best out of Gabriel Jesus, you need to work with Andre’. That is a legacy.”
Cunha used those five years working with Jesus to develop the principles on which Volt is now built. The organisation works with high-profile players including City’s Ederson, former Manchester United defender Alex Telles, Rodrigo Muniz of Fulham, West Ham’s Emerson Palmieri, Jonathan David from Lille and Jesus’ Arsenal team-mate Gabriel.
“Gabriel’s father called me,” says Cunha. “He has a great family around him, and they understand what is needed to support a football player. I went to his house, and we had two meetings. We decided to work together.”
In that initial meeting, Cunha asked Gabriel what his goals were for the coming years. “His answer was simple,” says Cunha. “Win titles with Arsenal, and be in the national team.”
With Cunha now in an executive role at Volt, he needed someone to take more of a hands-on, day-to-day approach with Gabriel. He selected a Portuguese physiotherapist called Renato Costa, who works daily with the centre-back.
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“The way we see the athletes is in three layers,” explains Cunha. “The first layer is the human, the second layer is the athlete and the third layer is the player. In the majority of cases, the secret to unlocking the potential for the player is in the first two: the person and the athlete.
“When with a new player like Gabriel, we run a mindset profile, nutrition profile, health profile, athlete profile and player profile. When you have all these profiles, you can identify the weakest link. What areas are a priority? Sometimes you might just choose one or two areas. You work on those for a month or two, and boom — the football starts to go up, and the pain starts to go down.”
Costa now serves as Gabriel’s performance manager. “He talks with our psychologist, our nutritionist, our personal trainer and our head of medicine, and together they develop a plan to help Gabriel,” says Cunha. “Every performance manager is in a WhatsApp group with our entire team of specialists. When a problem occurs, they talk directly to the experts.”
There is another WhatsApp group of significance — one which includes the Volt team and Arsenal’s own performance team.
“From day one, when Gabriel called me, I said that I want to give support to the club,” says Cunha. “I want to create an extension of the training ground.”
The relationship between football clubs and private practitioners is not always straightforward. “Clubs can be very wary of private staff,” admits Cunha. “It’s because the work that was done in the past was often poor, lacking in communication.”
Communication is the key to maintaining a smooth working relationship with Arsenal. “We have a WhatsApp group with the head physio, the lead physical performance coach, and the first-team doctor. Every day, we exchange data. We send them tomography, blood biomarkers, anything that can help them. And we always make sure it goes to the club before the player, so they have had a chance to see it first.”
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Cunha believes the next step may be for clubs to appoint a member of staff specifically to coordinate and liaise with external practitioners.
Players contracting private staff is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. “It’s not a trend anymore,” says Cunha. “It’s a reality.
“The training ground, the club, the staff — they try to reach outside. But the reality is the training ground is a place of competition, where you are fighting every day for your place in the team. Players sometimes use a kind of armour in that environment. They also need their own space.
“Sometimes there are issues a player will not want to talk about at the training ground. Sometimes there will be activities — like yoga, pilates, breathing exercises — that are not common in football, so the player might not feel comfortable performing them at training. That’s where we can help.”
After building a comprehensive player profile, Volt identified the areas for Gabriel to emphasise in his programme.
“As a central defender, the first thing he needs is explosive strength,” says Cunha. “He needs to win the battles against fast strikers.
“He needs to develop what we call ‘shield strength’. He needs to use his body. He needs control. He needs to understand how to decelerate, how to put his foot down on the pitch and create force and change of direction, but control his body and have awareness at the same time.
“To jump like Gabriel does, you need huge strength, and a very strong base of support. When you are that tall, it is not easy to keep your stability.
“Because Arsenal have lots of possession, there are more counter-attacks, so top speed is important. We work on all these things.”
Volt’s work is about educating the player — they want to give him autonomy. At 26, Gabriel is ready to soak up the information.
“Now he’s a father,” says Cunha. “He’s very different to a few years ago. He understands there is a time for work and a time for rest. He understands needing to make the right choices.
“And he’s getting results. That’s when you start this cycle — give everything, get results, work resumes.
“You work more, you receive more. And it goes on.”
(Top photo: Darren Staples/AFP via Getty Images)