THEY say the grass isn't always greener, but that was before Scottish football imploded.

Decamping to fresh pastures has worked out well for Ian Cathro, who has just completed a successful first season as assistant coach at Portuguese Primeira Liga club Rio Ave.

Previously regarded as a highly-innovative youth coach – two of his first group of primary school players, John Souttar and Ryan Gauld, have already broken into the Dundee United first team – Cathro's move into senior football has been rewarding. Despite operating in the shadow of neighbours Porto and playing in front of tiny crowds, Rio Ave finished in sixth place, ahead of Sporting Lisbon.

This was a great outcome for a club whose normal priority, and one which has not always been met, is to avoid relegation. This season brought the second highest league finish in their history, only bettered by a fifth place under the stewardship of Mourinho – not Jose, but his father Felix in 1981/82.

The stock of Portuguese coaches has never been higher, and Cathro, who is still just 26 years old, believes that the reputation of the man he answers to at Rio Ave will soon enjoy a wider currency. As was the case with Felix Mourinho, Rio Ave's current manager Nuno Espirito Santo is – unusually – a former goalkeeper, Santo having been a member the Porto squad which won the Champions League in 2004.

The 39-year-old was appointed to his first managerial position by Rio Ave last summer and, in contrast to the cronyism which is so prevalent in British football, appointed Cathro to his technical staff. The link came from a mutual respect forged when they met on a Largs coaching course and Cathro had little hesitation in resigning from his brief spell as the Scottish Football Asociation's performance school coach in Dundee.

Described somewhat unfairly by Mark Wotte, the SFA performance director, as not being committed, Cathro was anxious to escape from his Tayside comfort zone and take up the challenge of adapting to a different culture, language and professional environment. He now speaks Portuguese and has added a productive season in a highly-regarded European league to a cv which was exclusively concerned with youth development.

"It's the best decision I ever made," he says. "I had wanted to leave the country for a long time because I felt staying in the same environment was going to limit me. It was the correct time and the correct opportunity."

Cathro had just one niggling pang of guilt. That was leaving behind the young footballers he had nurtured, first at the Cathro Clinic he founded when just a teenager, later at Dundee United, where he was brought in by Craig Levein, and then, albeit very briefly, at the SFA's performance school. "I feel a bit like I've let these boys down," he says.

Typically, though, he has done something about it and tomorrow he will lead a party of 37 of his former pupils, aged 12-15, to the Algarve. There, they will enjoy first-rate training facilities and accommodation, ending the trip with matches against Portuguese equivalents, including one of Benfica's youth teams.

His duties with the Rio Ave first team have left him with little time to look closely at youth development in Portugal, but what is perhaps surprising is that, unlike the youth initiative in Scotland, elite boys' football in Portugal is intensely competitive.

"The teams want to win and every age group has a national championship with promotion and relegation," Cathro says. "But the tactical way of playing the game is really strong. If we created a youth promotion and relegation culture in Scotland our brains would tell us we need to keep it tight at the back, we want the ball in the other team's half, and we want to get it there quickly to see what develops out of it.

"That doesn't enter the Portuguese' minds. To them that's how to lose a match. Because they want to win they need to control the ball and where it is going to be played otherwise they're going to lose possession. That makes it easier for them to live with the match results being so important.

"They do, though, share some of our concerns – like the disappearance of street football, for example. There is also a thought that youth coaches want to make everything too tactical and place too much emphasis on winning because it will advance their own careers to a more senior level. Some issues are the same, no matter which country you are in."

Portugal has similarly had to cope with the disadvantage being the small neighbour of a powerful footballing nation but have done so much better than Scotland, albeit with the benefits of having a superior climate and a generous quota of Brazilian imports. But if there is a big South American influence on the pitch, Cathro is bemused that he has yet to encounter another non-Portuguese coach in the country's top division.

"There is a massive pride in the profession and a huge press expectancy about who will be the next big Portuguese manager," he says. "But even although there is the concept of a British style of football which is different from their own, the one manager they all looked up to was Sir Alex Ferguson."

Although Porto won the league, Cathro believes that runners-up Benfica were the better team. "I've never been in a bookmakers in my life, but I reckon that in Britain they would have paid out on Benfica winning the title with five games remaining," he says.

That Benfica have limped home second rounded off a season of disappointments for the Lisbon side, who were also eliminated from a Champions League group which contained Celtic and lost the Europa League final to Chelsea. Cathro recalls their demonstrative coach Jorge Jesus repeat three times on TV how strong Celtic were in the air.

Although Rio Ave had such a good season, only failing narrowly to secure the fifth-place finish which would have got them into the Europa League, they played in front of crowds of just over 2000. Yet despite an apparent apathy, Portugal is able to support three newspapers which report only on football. "It's accepted some fans go to matches and others don't," Cathro says with a shrug.

As in most European countries, a poorly-supported club like Rio Ave has no realistic chance of winning the top flight without the intervention of a vastly wealthy benefactor. Nevertheless, based in the small fishing and tourist town of Vila do Conde, it comes as a surprise to learn they do not even have a dedicated training ground.

Finishing sixth has, however, galvanised the club. "Everybody regarded it as a massively successful season," says Cathro. "For the first time the club will start the new season with an objective higher than just staying in the league."

n Ian Cathro's training group in the Algarve has been supported by Browns Sports & Leisure Club in Vilamoura and Brian Hamilton of Synthetic Grass Solutions.