This could well be true. Ferreira likes the 3-4-3 in attack, which so far (and from what I saw in vids of his previous seasons) has been accomplished by dropping one fullback back while the other runs forward. If Esiti can handle that third defender job, then it stands to reason Matos and Giannoulis will both be farther up. This would leave us short a man in the middle, however - against a team like Ajax I would question the logic of this.
Augusto has a nice distance shot in him, but El Kaddouri will almost certainly need to play with Esiti for this to be effective. I haven't seen much creativity from Augusto yet, while El Kaddouri is best when trying to be creative. Add to that Pelkas dropping back a little bit (who knows, maybe interchanging with Omar?) and you could have the creativity you need there in the middle.
Would still be better if we had Oliveira next to him though. Oliveira would be much better defensively than El Kaddouri, I feel.