Oh I know we're not one of the best, by far. We don't have neither the monetary prowress that the top teams of Europe have to attract the best players, nor do we have a league with enough visibility to gain that monetary prowress. In comparison, our yearly budget is equivalent to one of the bottom teams of the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga or Serie A. 

But in terms of competitiveness and making the most of what we have, we are amongst the best out there. There's a reason a lot of top coaches and analysts around Europe consider that either Porto and Benfica could have the capacity to fight for 3rd place on La Liga or struggle with the 6 top teams of the Premier League, even with our current conditions. If we somehow managed to gain more visibility and budget to attract even better players, I don't have any doubts that we would be amongst the very best teams on Europe. 

I just hate it when someone out there call our team mediocre, mostly because we lack the visibility and media impact that the best teams out there have. Last year, Porto was considered to be the best team behind Barça in many international ratings, statistics and analysts, not only for our insane winning streak on both the domestic and international sides, but also because our playstyle was pretty good to behold too. The problem is that it's easy to slip out of the media and public's opinion radar when you don't have the dimension that the european big sharks have (also we've had a pretty bad season by our own standards, even if we're on the verge of winning the championship this season). 

Portugal has the huge benefit that they get lots of young talented Brazilian players. The amount of talented Portuguese players is not as high. Looking at the current top clubs, only Braga has a reasonable amount of Portuguese players.
Usually the top talents leave the Portuguese clubs, but the not as talented ones stay, so they still have a constant stream of decent players.
Something what a comparable league, such as the Dutch league, doesn't have. They purely rely on their own players.... and then sell them while they're young.

You don't see many English, Italian, Spanish or German players playing in other leagues, because they don't have to. "Your" talented players need to get a new mentality to stay in the country and this is achieved best when they are young.
Similar to Germany after the Euros 1988 and World Cup win in 1990. We were for a short period of time the best league in the world. Then almost everyone stayed in Italy or elsewhere and our league was left with few worldclass players and almost no young ones.
Now we fought our way back into the top 3 and that is purely due to our youngsters who stayed in our league even though they have offerings from top class clubs around Europe.
At the moment only Özil and Khedira left Germany rather early and now Marko Marin follows (Chelsea) because he disappointed at Bremen after his first season.

The only German club that could spent tons of money is Bayern Munich, but they only do it occasionally (Gomez, Robben, Ribery, Neuer). Around $100m - Probably what other clubs spent in one season *cough* C. Ronaldo *cough*. But many more important players came from their youth division. Schweinsteiger, Lahm, Alaba, Badstuber, Contento, Müller, Kroos still play for Bayern; Ottl, Guerrero, Hitzlsperger, Lell and Rensing still in the Bundesliga; Trochowski, Hargreaves and Misimovic elsewhere in Europe.

Dortmund saw a similar trend and that made them to the domestic champion in 2011 and 2012:
Götze, Großkreuz, Schmelzer, Sahin plus the now returning Reus

You don't need to attract players, you need to breed them. Spain is the best example that it works, Germany too and Italy is the best example that relying on foreign players might fail eventually. I'm not dooming anything, but England could be next.

I agree completely, and the influx of foreign players from south america and the outflux of portuguese players from our own league is also slowly killing our national team as well. Our talented young players almost always leave our clubs right after their formation in the Youth teams and go into other leagues where they have to compete with the local talent to get playing chances. 

The problem with our current club and league mentality is that we think that in order to stay competitive in the international scene, we need to rely on quick and accessible talent, but there's also a much bigger problem. The top 3 portuguese teams rely a lot on the dealings of those players because we need to have a constant flux of money from them to keep our finances up. We don't have the negotiative conditions from TV rights, sponsors and other income sources to keep our current finances, heck even the prize money from CL participations isn't sometimes enough (see Benfica and their huge negative assets). Also, we could never afford to even come to 1/4th of spending 100m $ on a season, heck, Porto's biggest sign so far, Danilo for 15m € was considered to be a huge gamble and a huge financial risk. Our signings usually vary between 3 - 7m € and we never spend over 25m € a season, because we just don't have the cash for it.

Personally, I think that portuguese teams have to rethink their strategy and start from scratch. They can still be lucrative with young portuguese talent a couple of years down the road, if they start thinking in the long term and start investing properly on them. We have proven evidence that portuguese players do have talent and can be useful for top team scenarios if carefully breed and trained, but sadly I just don't see the teams having that kind of long term vision.

Sorry, i should have said what else could he realistically have done. So presumably you don't rate Alex Ferguson's achievements at United, Wenger's at Arsenal, Mourinho's at Chelsea, Inter or Madrid, and so on, because they either inherited good teams or spent millions to build them. In fact, other than Porto in 2004, when was the last time a "Mediocre" team won anything of note. All this Guardiola/Barca hate is just people spotting success and trying to look clever and different by slagging them off. In my opinion.

Edit: Liverpool in 2005, that's when. Other than that though...

Thank you for calling us a "mediocre" team >_>.

We might not play in the "OH MY GOSH BEST LEAGUES IN THE WORLD EVER", but you know what? We have as many international titles as some of the "Sharks" in European history. Up until 2010, we had as many CL wins as Man. Utd, we are, on par with Liverpool, the other team in history to win a consecutive UEFA cup & CL, we are one of the teams with not only the most participations in the CL knockout rounds but also one of the teams that has made it most times to the quarter finals (at least) in CL history, we're also one of the very few clubs in the world to have won the CL, Super Cup and International Cup of the same season.

If this is "mediocre", then hell, there's a lot of shitty teams. Please tell me, how many international titles does Arsenal have? Inter must also be a "mediocre" team for having won 7 international titles, the same as Porto. 

Educate yourselves better before you call anyone's team "mediocre".