So… listen to this… At Santos they believe in this legend, they say every few decades a “lightning bolt” hits Vila Belmiro and a new phenomenon is born… and as much as people say that a lightning bolt never strikes the same place twice… there, they insist it has already happened 4 different times… First it was Pelé, then Robinho… Neymar… and the fourth was Rodrygo… and though it’s hard to deny that on the 4th of May 2022… a lightning bolt certainly struck the Bernabéu… I gotta admit that I don’t believe Rodrygo is quite like the others… he wasn’t the chosen one… he wasn’t blessed by the gods with infinite talent… he was built up into the player he is today… through blood, sweat and tears… all at the hands of his own father… People joke about turning their kids into “Project Mbappé”, you know, making sure that from the moment your son is born, he lives with no other purpose but to become a world class football player and… that was pretty much what happened here… That day, when the Real Madrid fans looked at their TV’s, saw they had a 1% chance of making it and prayed to the football gods for a miracle… well, I hate to break it to them… but what came was no miracle, it was 19 years in the making… You see, before Ródrygo was even born it was already all about football… You know what his father told his pregnant mom when she said she felt like it was time to give birth… he told her: “Keep that baby inside you! ”. .
. Why? Simple, he was supposed to have been born on Christmas day, meaning he would forever be the youngest kid in every youth team he joined, which according to his father was “a disaster for any kid trying to go pro”.
. . so, in his mind, there was no other option but to bend the call of nature itself to his own will… in fact, he even admitted that he never told his mom why he was so adamant that the kid had to be born after new year’s and over the last few weeks, he even avoided taking her to the hospital, afraid the doctors would insist that it was time… as he said it himself: “On new year’s, I was rubbing her belly, counting down… 4…3…2…1… and then I told her: Our son is going to be a football player… I just knew it would happen”.
. . Look… I know what you’re thinking… this is a bit crazy… a bit out of pocket… and you’re definitely not wrong but you have to realize the entire family was obsessed with football….
The dad himself was a footballer…. or I guess would eventually become one, since after all he was only 16 years old when Rodrygo was born… there were even some rumors that his mom was like… shockingly good at football, even though she never tried to make a career out of it… so Rodrygo had no choice… football was going to be his life, whether he liked it or not… He has said that by age 2, he already played with a football from the moment he woke up to the moment he went to sleep… whenever he had a birthday party, the gift was always a football and the theme was always not football, but Real Madrid specifically … Real Madrid cake, Real Madrid banners, Real Madrid hats… Even when he got a haircut, it was always whatever Neymar was rocking at the time… In fact, once his father went pro, he made Rodrygo the mascot of every team he played for… he would bring him alongside him into the team bus and into the locker room and one day… when some second tier team he played for faced Santos in the São Paulo State Championship, he brought him in so he could see his idol up close… it was football, football, football… When his dad taught him that if he believed it enough, anything could happen, that “words are extremely powerful”, Rodrygo took it literally, everyday he would stare in the mirror and he would tell himself: “I will play for Brazil, I will play for Real Madrid, I will win the Champions League, I will win the World Cup”. .
. just trying to speak it into existence… and by the age of 5, he already believed it as much as his dad, he would tell his mom: “Don’t worry, one day, I’ll be the best player in the world”. .
. but ironically, his first step towards that, almost gave his mom a heart attack… Rodrygo spent a lot of his time playing in this dirt pitch with kids a few years older than him that all played for this tiny really local futsal club and everytime their coach would come by in his van to pick them up… Rodrygo would stay behind, completely heartbroken that he was too young to join in… until… one day… the coach parked the car nearby and sat there watching them and realized that the tiny kid he never paid any attention to was much better than the rest of them… so once the game fizzled out… he called him over and told him to hop in the car, so they could go sign him up for their next tournament…. I don’t know what the guy was thinking, but well… two of Rodrygo’s cousins went running to his mom, saying they saw him hop into a van with some strange man and before you knew it, she was calling the cops… thankfully, the kid ended up showing up before things got truly out of hand, but as Rodrygo said: “Everyone was desperate, they were sure I had been kidnapped… When I showed up my mom was furious, she grounded me immediately… but man, I was only a kid, I was blinded by the opportunity… A football tournament?
I didn’t even think twice”. . .
and in a way… thank god, he didn’t… Once he began playing, it wasn’t long before his name slowly became known all over town, all kinds of stories going around… they spoke about this tiny kid, the youngest in his squad, who was brought into a match at half time with his team losing 2 nil and quickly turned the game around, scoring 7 all by himself… and in the blink of an eye, he was on trial at São Paulo under-9s… where he performed so well, they demanded to check his ID, only to realize that, indeed, he wasn’t over the age of 9… in fact, he was only 7… But even once there…. it wasn’t all nice, his dad still got kind of rough at times, he used to act as referee in these local games Rodrygo played in but he’d never call out any fouls on his own son… he claimed it was a way for him to get tougher, but the kids noticed, so they’d go really hard at Rodrygo and still… the dad wouldn’t budge… I know that sounds…relatively tame, but it got harsh enough that the mom had to intervene and force him to stop… In fact, you should never underestimate his mom… After Rodrygo turned 9, the dad’s football career started taking a turn and soon he was forced to move out of town looking for a job at a new club, so he could keep supporting his kid’s football career and though the mom felt like he was abandoning her with their son, claiming he was “living in a fantasy world… giving up on their marriage over the dreams of a 9 year old child”. .
. . she took over flawlessly… though Rodrygo would cry every time his father left… his career did not stall one bit… In fact, things got kind of absurd, pretty quickly… Less than a year later, Rodrygo found out that São Paulo had a club policy where they never gave kids their professional debut before the age… of 15… and knowing the kids at Santos were technically allowed to join the first team in the Paulista Championship… while also being hopelessly obsessed with Neymar and Ganso… Rodrygo started planning a way to join them but knowing he’d never manage to convince his parents to drive him 2 hours to training… you know what he did?
He waited for his next match against then and made sure to play well enough that by the final whistle, it was the Santos staff doing the convincing… telling his dad that Rodrygo had the “Santos DNA”, that he could be “the next robinho”, “the next neymar”. . .
and as you may imagine, he caved in… no matter how crazy it was, Rodrygo joined in and for a year he played for both clubs at the same time… his daily routine was so absurd that in the morning, his mom would dress him up in his kit and then carry him to the car, while he was still asleep, just so he could get a few more hours of rest… he would quite literally wake up and already be at the training grounds… and once that was done, he was back on the car, rushing to get to class, then training at São Paulo, back to bed and the next day… it was the same all over again… and somehow… he never complained… Instead, as he said: “If I missed one single session, I’d be out of my mind”. . .
and as he turned 11 years old… that commitment finally paid off… Rodrygo became the youngest ever Brazilian to sign with Nike, breaking the record of none other… than Neymar… and if that wasn’t enough to start the rumors that the next lightning bolt had struck Vila Belmiro, let me tell you… Rodrygo was surely doing enough on the pitch… as one of his coaches said: “Over those years, I spent more time with him than with my own kids and I gotta say… On the futsal pitch, he was clearly better than Neymar. There was one match where a coach started mocking him, telling him he was nothing more than a showpony, I thought to myself: “Poor guy, he’s messing with the wrong kid”… suddenly, he took the ball, dribbled the entire team, scored, ran back to the opposition’s bench and yelled at him: “Who’s laughing now? ”.
. . At the end of the match, I told him he couldn’t act like that, that if that’s how he reacts whenever someone provokes him, then I’d start doing it myself every match… and you know what he said to me: “There’s no point, I already score every match”.
. . From then on, things just kept getting better… by the time he was 15, he was scoring 24 goals in 22 matches for Santo’s under 17’s, at one point scoring 6 in a single match, attracting the interest of Liverpool and damn near moving to Europe… leading the Santo’s fans to begin calling him a mercenary, booing him every match, claiming he could not compare himself to Neymar or Robinho, if he was gonna leave before paying back the club for what they had done for him… so, in the end, he caved in and signed a professional contract with a release clause of 50 million euros… and finally joined the first team… This was the most important stage of the project, it was around this time that most “wonderkids” failed, so to make sure it all worked out… his father literally ended his own career so he could be by his side 24/7… and then it happened… With Rodrygo warming up, the plaque went up and the number 43 was on the board… he was going to get his debut precisely against Robinho’s Atlético Mineiro… as he told himself: “I was scared out of my mind… when the crowd started chanting my name, it was beautiful, but I only thought: “No!
No! No! Don’t do that”.
. . I didn’t even get to touch the ball, I was only there for a minute… but it was like a dream”.
. . and the next year, after 18 minutes on the pitch, he scored his first to give Santos the win in injury time, the match after that, he secured a draw with seconds left on the clock… and about a month later, Rodrygo was given his first ever start at the Libertadores… He was 17 years, two months and six days old… that day, though he literally had to skip school to be at the match… 43 minutes in, he became the youngest Brazilian to ever score in the competition… The hype was out of this world… Now everyone wondered whether he could really be better than Neymar… one journalist said that “he isn’t just good, he is great… whenever he’s on the pitch, the ball stops for him and him only”.
. . and another went as far as saying that: “I’ll never miss any match this kid is in and I’ll tell you more… if my wife asks me to stay home, then I don’t have a wife anymore”.
. . After that match, Rodrygo became a regular starter, teams from all over Europe began scouting him, and the offers started pouring in… PSG were the first, but as much as Rodrygo led them on, they never meant to close any deals… then came Barcelona… but the one club he dreamed of… Real Madrid… their scouts only watched from a distance, never actually approaching them… The days passed, Barcelona put in more and more pressure and eventually, it was all one signature away… his dad had visited Catalunya, they had sent him a kit with his name on it… there was nothing else they could do and yet Rodrygo kept telling his dad to wait a little longer… to wait for Real… the man nearly lost his mind, telling the kid: “you’re crazy, you could playing with Messi… you’re throwing away the chance of a lifetime”, but he had seen Vini sign for Los Blancos the year before and now he was matching his numbers, a lot of people in the press were claiming that he was the better player… he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t getting a chance, so in one last ditch effort, he asked his dad: “give me one more match… this weekend, I’m gone score 3 goals and they’ll come running, I promise you”.
. . But then, even though he scored a 9 minute hat trick… he got home and immediately asked if there were any news from Real and his dad replied: “no, nothing”.
. . in Rodrygo’s own words: “I was devastated, I didn’t have to train the next day, so I stayed home, playing FIFA, just feeling sorry for myself… but then, I saw my dad leaving the house in a suit… I asked my mom what was up, but she played it off, so I went back to my room and a few hours later, he got back and layed two shirts on my bed… one for Real, one for Barcelona and he said: “Son, today your dream becomes a reality, you just have to pick”.
. . turns out, Real had called just after the final whistle but the dad had decided to hide everything from him… until a deal was reached… and then, there was only one final thing to do… Rodrygo and his dad went over to Pelé’s house to receive his blessing, and the king himself gave him one piece of advice: “Never be afraid of anything”.
. . and Rodrygo took that to heart… Once Real Madrid paid 45 million euros for him, making him the 12th most expensive signing in their history… and the number one most expensive teenager alongside Vinicius Jr… he wasn’t afraid of his price tag… once he had to step into the locker room, knowing he was one of the youngest ever foreign players to get the chance to do so… the superstars around him didn’t scare him… and the fans didn’t either… When the time to face the hell of the Bernabeu arrived, that kid who had once almost begged the fans to stop chanting his name was long gone… Rodrygo scored on his debut and then two matches later scored again… but as for any Real Madrid player, the biggest test is the Champions League and I guess you could say that the UCL night surely didn’t scare him either… On his second ever match in the competition, Rodrygo went in against Galatasaray and 4 minutes later he scored the opener with his left foot… 3 minutes later he scored again, this time with his head… and only 2 minutes after that… Tony Kross went down in the penalty box and after a VAR check… Rodrygo had the chance to score the fastest Champions League hat trick of all time… but unfortunately, Sergio Ramos chose to take it himself… Regardless, history would be made that night, as after assisting Benzema for the 4th goal… Rodrygo showed up in injury time, nudging the ball in with his right foot, completing the perfect hat trick and becoming the second youngest player to ever score a Champions League hat trick… and who is number one you ask?
he had what it took to become the best in the world”. . .
and if that felt great, it felt even better when, in that same week, Rodrygo woke up from a nap to hear screams coming from downstairs and his cell phone buzzing like crazy… picking up the first call that popped up and hearing his father say: “Congratulations, son”. . .
to which, still confused from waking up, he asked “What? Is it my birthday? What have I done?
” and the father replied “You’ve been called up”. . .
to which confused, he went “To what? Real Madrid doesn't play tomorrow”. .
. and he added “Son, I’m talking about the national team”. .
. . And though then things did slow down a bit, with Rodrygo struggling to deal with the pandemic… once he came back in his third season, he came back with a vengeance… If it wasn’t enough that he had pulled off 4 goal contributions in 5 Champions League group stage matches… in the quarter finals, with Real Madrid down 4 to 3 on aggregate… Ancelotti called upon his secret weapon, told him “go in and change the game” and 2 minutes later he had scored… from there on out, what happened was history… With the famous 99 to 1 chance, Rodrygo came in and scored twice to once again miraculously level the match before Benzema finished the job yet again… and 24 days later, no matter how many teams had supposedly “played better than Real Madrid”.
. . they were champions of Europe… so… as Rodrygo said: “If you plan to kill a snake… you gotta aim for the head”.
. .
