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By Rory Smith
MANCHESTER, England – What moves Martelinho, every time he sees Bruno Fernandes play, is how little he has changed. Fernandes is probably now the most productive player in the form team of the world’s largest league, but for Martelinho. He is not much more than the teenager who trained in the youth groups of a Portuguese club who suffered ten years ago.
“That’s how it is now, so it has been,” Martelinho said, recalling the two years he spent running with Fernandes at Boavista Academy. “He played with a lot of ambition, with the lead, without ever betting a pass back. , looking to get into the penalty area. I needed more experience, but everything you see now was there then.
This is the biography of Fernandes’ teammates among the world’s players, of course, the transcendent gifts, dazzling to all, who earn a place on the fast path of football to greatness. The position in one of the largest skill factories. in the world A season or two in the first team, then the justification for a lucrative play and that grabs the headlines in England or Spain.
But if Fernandes’ starting point and destination fits this model, there is no transparent line between the Fernandes martelinho met and those he and the rest of the global see today, the one that flourished – last year – in the manchester engine United’s resurgence.
Instead, he took a more twisted path, one involving a season in the Italian-speaking department and several others in the less glamorous corners of the country’s first league, years that would necessarily leave him “anonymous”, to use Martelinho’s word, in his homeland until he was twenty years old.
Fernandes’ account can be perceived as an uplifting account of backward gratification, hard pay, perseverance and dedication, or it can be interpreted as an uplifting account of an inefficiency deeply rooted in the way football reduces its quest for talent Let us remember that the margins between good fortune and failure are intelligent and that fate can rest on something as undeniable as a bus.
As a headhunter for Novara, an Italian football team founded in a small town west of Milan and, that season, suffering at the foot of Serie A, Cristiano Giaretta used to receive unsolicited calls from agents providing players who might be of interest.
When a Portuguese agent named Miguel Pinho contacted Giaretta in 2012 to introduce a teenage midfielder to Boavista, he may have simply ignored it. His task of sticking to a lot of players in much of Europe. I had never heard of Pinho, and he had never heard of Bruno Fernandes.
Actually, he hasn’t either. Although Boavista is historically the team of the moment in the city of Portugal, Porto, the currency crisis had left him in trouble in the third department at the time. Its youth formula had a smart reputation, but through a not unusual consensus, the cream of the country In the academies of its 3 great clubs accumulated endless young football skills: Benfica, Sporting and FCPorto.
Fernandes was lucky enough to point to at least one of them. Born in Maia, not far from Porto, he saw through Porto and Boavista while participating in a youth tournament, both offering him a position in his quarry. He chose Boavista, apparently, because he had volunteered to send a minibus to take him to training, and none of his parents can simply drive.
It is an edition of the story that his former coach Martelinho, for his part, disputes. “I think he thinks he can sign for the first team more fluently in Boavista,” he said. “I made the same selection when I was”. a player, and for the same reason, it’s a smaller club, so it’s less difficult to play.
Whatever the reason, it is possibly the resolution that outlines the path of Fernandes. The youth parties of Porto attract visitors from all over Europe, looking in the picture for the next great hope of Portugal, not Boavista.
Had he signed for Porto, Fernandes could have followed the maximum family trail towards fame and fortune, which at least would have attracted the attention of the selectors of the other groups of Portugal, smug for the next generation of young talents.
In Boavista, in fact, he was in the shadows. ” He has never been called up for national teams,” Martelinho said. “I don’t know why, there were a lot of talented players in his generation. “The vast majority of them, of course, came here with the added glamour of gambling for one of Portugal’s established giants.
It was this carelessness that gave Giaretta a chance and took Fernandes another way. On the phone, Pinho looked like a “serious” kind of person, Giaretta said, so he didn’t reject the concept as nothing more than an agent speech. he traveled to northern Portugal to see Fernandes, 17, in an academy match.
“My first impression was good, but not exceptional,” Giaretta said. “You may see the technical quality. Your decision-making is higher than average. He’s nice to his feet. But he’s not the most productive player in the Box or anything. Meeting Fernandes influenced him.
“You may immediately see that you were in front of an adult,” Giaretta said to anticipate that Novara moved to point to the teenager.
Giaretta doesn’t know if Boavista didn’t have much hope in Fernandes’ progression, or if the club was on a monetary stage so weakened that he might just not say no, however, Novara finally paid less than $50,000 to point it out. “Every move is a risk,” he said. But yes, it was a calculated bet, even the loss of a few thousand euros would have been a heavy blow to the club.
He had to spend it on Fernandes, an undated 17-year-old, whom no one else seemed to appreciate, from a third-apartment club in Portugal, a club no one seemed to bother to see. Eight years later, Fernandes would charge Manchester United $97 million.
Francesco Guidolin was intrigued. As coach of Udinese, he used to be taken to talented young players from all over the world, promising polyglots and teenagers, drawn from darkness through the club’s unrivalled network of scouts. However, it was rare to find one so close, home.
Fernandes’ tenure at Novara had been brief: only a year, in fact, in which he won a place in the club’s first team, scored 4 times in 23 games, earned the nickname – Novara’s Maradona – before being sold, on a massive benefit, to Udinese in Serie A. Giaretta was also in the middle of this; He left Novara for Udinese in 2013 and advised Fernandes to his new employer.
Guidolin hadn’t noticed much about Fernandes in Novara. When Fernandes arrived in Udinese, Guidolin was “curious” to see what this teenager looked like. “We went to education camp before the season,” Guidolin said. in Serie A there are other things, but we can immediately see that it was ready.
In fact, Guidolin felt that, perhaps Fernandes’ first exposure to senior football, even at a point of decline, had been of interest to him. “A year in Serie B is a more complete delight than coming directly from the youth system. “said about the players who moved to Italy. ” You may see that he was more certain, that he took on more responsibilities than the top players his age. “
Looking at his trajectory ever since, one wonders if, perhaps, the long road has worked in Fernandes’ favor, which now stands out for everyone who worked with him in his early day is his willingness to lead: to bring behind him a team, even as heavy as Manchester United.
Perhaps he has learned that over the years he has passed among the small luminaries of the game: one in Novara, 3 in Udinese, one in Sampdoria. In the summer of 2017, when he returned to Portugal – as the most beloved signing moment in Sporting’s history – he had not yet won a call-up for the Portugal national team (although he did captain his under-21 team). His arrival was not announced as a coup d’eer. “Most of the big groups hadn’t noticed much about it,” Martelinho said.
And yet, in just a few months, Portugal seems to be missing. “The Portuguese league is not as strong as England, Spain or Germany,” Martelinho said. “But this is arguably the fifth or sixth most productive league in Europe. Bruno made it easy.
Its effect on England was no less rapid. It has not yet been 12 full months since his arrival at Old Trafford, however, he has already been chosen for a Premier League team of the season and, with his team emerging by claiming at the end of a seven-year championship wait, is among the most sensible candidates to win the campaign Player of the Year award.
And yet, if his ascent turns out fast, it’s anything, Fernandes will have had to wait for that moment. Not because of him, but because of a failure in football design, because of his inability to seek skill in unforeseen places. He was the player he was and maybe he was. It only took a while for the game to notice, and all because I needed to take a bus so many years ago.
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