So… listen to this… any player can be stopped… no matter how good your dribbling may be… if they put 5 defenders on you, you’re doomed… you’re going to the ground… but that’s exactly where the problem lies… there isn’t really a way for a team to go a whole match without giving away a free kick and that’s what made Juninho Pernambucano unstoppable… it wasn’t just that he scored more free kicks than any other player in history… he had a sniper rifle where his right foot should’ve been… no matter where he was on the pitch, if you let him take a shot… it would go in… as Henry said “free kicks were like penalties for him” and no one could figure out how he did it… even Pirlo himself collected old DVDs of his matches and insisted it was all black magic… any defender who faced him, had to tiptoe around his teammates, scared of bringing them down… one mistake and they’d be forced to stand and watch as the ball flew into the net… but, for the love of god, do not act like free kicks were all he had in his bag… had he not sacrificed his legacy to pay back Lyon for saving his career who knows what this man could have done, he had Rivaldo begging Barcelona to sign him… and he said no… when they asked Benzema who was his greatest ever teammate aside from Ronaldo, Juninho was the first name out of his mouth… he was one of the most clutch players in history, at his prime, he had the likes of Barcelona, Bayern and Real trembling at the idea of facing Lyon and all of them tasted defeat… hell… long before he had even stepped foot in France, he had been declared by the Brazilians as “the king of the hill”, taking a Vasco Da Gama squad that had one league title to their name in 20 years, conquering all of South America and then leaving them one step away from being crowned World Champions… twice… even though, believe it or not, he only joined his first football academy when he was closing in on his 17th birthday… You see… at Juninho’s childhood home, football was forbidden… his dad was ex-military, living in the “nice” side of town, in his mind, football was something for the kids in the ghetto… if he even found a football inside his house, he would put a knife through it… so you know what Juninho did? Since there was no way he’d ever be allowed to join a proper team, Juninho repeatedly sneaked out to play in a pitch right by his building while his dad was out at work, then gathered the other kids from that apartment complex, got one of the other parents to coach them, signed them up for a proper under-10 futsal tournament… and won… like, they beat Naútico, a proper first division club, 6 to 1 in the final with Juninho coming out as the tournament’s top scorer… in one of the recordings, you can literally hear his coach whisper that: “I just hope I’ll be alive long enough to watch him play for the national team”. .
. Still, as you may imagine, it took years… even when Santa Cruz, one of the biggest teams in the state, handed him an academy contract, he was too afraid to get his father to sign it… it took his own sister going behind his father and getting Juninho a trial at Sport Recife, the club he had supported since he was a kid, so that he finally got a proper shot at football… but even then, he got there, the coach looked at him and said: “Boy, you’re white and you've got green eyes, what the hell are you doing here? ”.
. . No matter what, less than 2 years later, he was already playing for the first team, scoring two goals against their rivals, Santa Cruz, even dribbling the keeper for the second to qualify his team for the second stage of the Pernambuco Championship….
where he added another screamer on his way to the final, assisting the first leg’s only goal as Sport Recife were named Pernambuco champions… with the fans naming that team “the golden generation”. . .
as their average age was only 22… matter of fact, Juninho himself was still only 19, but well… it was still just Pernambuco, not only were they 13 hundred miles away from Rio but they were not exactly known for producing many football stars… if they wanted to make their names known, they had to shock everyone in the Brazilian Championship… so… that’s what they did… Where as usually they would get their asses handed to them, this time, they managed to beat Corinthians to make it to the second stage where somehow, in an absurdly stacked group, they nearly shocked Palmeiras, who could only beat them thanks to an own goal, then held Santos to a draw, before destroying Botafogo 5 to 2, leading every commentator to claim they were just “getting lucky”, “going through a purple patch”. . .
only to then face, the 2 time world champions, São Paulo who had just defeated AC Milan and Barcelona to take those two titles consecutively…. in a match where Juninho impressed so much, putting in slide tackle after slide tackle before going on to assist one and score the other, taking the man of the match and getting the commentator to call his performance “an 11 out of 10” as they again won 5 to 2… leading São Paulo’s manager, the great Telé Santana, to sit down for the press conference and claim that: “São Paulo did not play poorly, it was that one boy who was outstanding”. .
. before asking his name and telling them that: “you can say your goodbyes, he won’t be here for long”. .
. and indeed, after missing out on the quarter finals thanks to that one own goal, he closed out the year by winning the Nordeste Cup, scoring another screamer against Fortaleza and suddenly… After only one full season as a pro, he had former Real Madrid player and World Champion, Ricardo Rocha, begging the Vasco Da Gama board to sign him… Still, even at that point, once he got to the club, they had no real expectations for him, it was kind of a shot in the dark… but then, in his very first game, he stuck in a goal from outside the box, earning his first few appearances as Vasco went through a tough time, eventually forcing his way into the starting eleven on his second season, taking over as the team’s main free kick taker and managing to close out the year with 13 goals… as they quickly realized this guy had some kind of superpower… By his third season, it was just absurd, as one of his teammates told in an interview: “the club had to order special training mannequins just for him… they were 7 feet tall and still, it seemed out of every 5 free kicks he took, 5 would go into the top corner… and the farther away he was from goal, the better he got”. .
. throughout the year, it seemed every time they needed him the most, that clutch free kick would always come in, not to mention assist after assist… and by the end, as Vasco took the third Brazilian Championship in their history… even with Edmundo scoring 42 goals… Once it was time to celebrate, Juninho was the one the players lifted up in the air, as the whole stadium chanted: “hey, hey, hey, Juninho is our king”. .
. though… he was yet to show them just how clutch he could be… The next year, the club’s 100th anniversary, he started things off by assisting the only goal as the Carioca Championship’s title match went into injury time… and then, 2 months later, with Vasco needing a goal to reach the final of the Libertadores, Juninho came in late and with 9 minutes left on the clock, they got a free kick 35 yards away from goal… scared, the players on the wall tried desperately to get as close to the ball as possible, even after the referee pulled them back… and yet, as a commentator would say: “when a good free kick taker hits the ball well, it flies… when Juninho hit it, it floated like a paper plane”. .
. swerving midway towards goal and going right into the top corner… opening the way for a relatively easy win in the final, leading everyone to consider it the goal of the title, eventually being voted by the fans, with 5 times more votes than any other goal… as the most important in Vasco’s history, so much so that, to this day, that is still their only ever Libertadores title… and 26 years later, the fans still sing “against River Plate, sensational, goal from Juninho, monumental”. .
. That year, only one thing could make it all that much sweeter for Vasco… to become World Champions… and so, of course, the moment Real Madrid took the lead in the Intercontinental Cup final thanks to an own goal… Juninho came in, took a great first touch and volleyed it straight into the top corner as the whole world held their breaths, struggling to believe Vasco was outplaying Real… only for Raúl to come out of nowhere with one of the greatest goals of all time, turning that day, instead, into one of the saddest in Juninho’s career… which… would only become worse a year later… In 1999, Juninho opened the year by scoring and assisting in the semi finals of the Rio-São Paulo Tournament, putting Vasco in the final, and then scoring two and assisting another to take the title, becoming so important to the team over that year, that when he was called up for a national team match against Argentina, they had an airplane waiting for him, so he could come back in time to play for Vasco that very same day, all the way out in Uruguay… With the team flying high, once Romário joined the club just as they were invited to the first ever edition of the club world cup, miraculously giving them a second chance at becoming World Champions, everyone was losing their minds…. but then, having already demolished the Man United treble winning squad in order to reach the final… they got there and… lost on penalties to Corinthians… leading Juninho to promise himself that from then on, until the end of the year, he would not allow Vasco to let go of any silverware in sight… Eventually, landing at the semi finals of the Copa Mercosul, assisting a goal and putting in the ball for another as they defeated River yet again, then scoring the opener in the final’s first leg, still being forced into a tie-breaker, where Vasco would fall behind 3 nil by half time and somehow come back to win 4 to 3, despite playing with only ten man on the pitch… all while, at the same time, going through the knockout stage of the Brazilian Championship, with Juninho scoring decisive free kicks to pull them back from behind in the last 16, then in the semi finals and then in the final itself, taking another title and being named as the best midfielder in the country for the second year in a row, as the crowd chanted: “please stay” knowing damn well that with the board still refusing to give Juninho a raise, even though he was getting severely underpaid, sooner or later, he’d forced to leave… and so… it was… Juninho took things to court… and ended up sidelined for 6 months… and it could have been longer, if not for Lyon… You see, 14 years earlier, Lyon was bought by millionaire Jean-Michel Aulas… who had one single goal: to bring them all the way from the second tier to the top of French football, but up till that moment, they were yet to secure any silverware at all… so, when he saw the position Juninho was in… he realized he had finally found the answer to his problems… He got a team of lawyers working to find a loophole that could get him out of Brazil and before Vasco even noticed what was going on… they had already scheduled a plane for Juninho to move to France… the only problem was that before he got on that plane, Rivaldo heard that there was a chance Juninho was available, so he got on the phone with everyone at Barcelona and suddenly, they offering Juninho way more money than Lyon ever could… meaning that… well… when Lyon’s representatives sat at the airport only to realize that Juninho had never even gotten on the flight they had booked for him, they thought they had lost him… until a couple hours later, he called and said: “Don’t worry, I truly did just miss the flight… they could have offered 200 times more than you did, I gave you my word that I’d do anything for Lyon and I will keep it”.
. . When the news came out in Brazil that Juninho had rejected Barcelona for Lyon, they all thought he was crazy… no one there had any idea what Lyon was, for all they knew… PSG and Marseille were the only big clubs in France… but only a year later, in the most dramatic fashion, Lyon would be sitting in second place, 1 point behind RC Lens with one game left… precisely… against RC Lens… and with a win being the only way they could take the title, just as their rivals began taking control of the game, pulling back a goal after Lyon went 2 nil in front… Juninho himself, slid in between 3 players and put in the perfectly weighted pass for his teammate to score, as Lyon secured their first league title in 52 years of history, though Juninho… had no intention of stopping… The next year, now with his preferred number 8 on the back of his shirt, not only did he keep up the world class playmaking, assisting more goals than any other player in the team, but he quickly sent a warning to every striker in the squad that not even their jobs were safe… scoring a hat trick that included two free kick goals only two months into the season, with the final of those goal being so outrageous that it had Patrick Muller in complete disbelief… eventually finding Lyon in third place with 10 matches left, 3 points behind both Monaco and Marseille… seemingly showing up any time they were struggling, scoring a brace to turn the game around against Ajaccio, scoring the winner against Nice and finally forcing Montplier to a draw, as Lyon edged Monaco out to the title by a single point…with Juninho, unbelievably, finished as their top scorer… and before anyone could claim that his clutchness was just a coincidence… guess what?
In his third season, he started the year by pulling two consecutive man of the match performances against Bayern Munich, in one creating 4 goal scoring chances and winning 21 out of 22 duels, which must be some kind of Champions League record, and in the second, scoring another mind boggling free kick just 8 minutes into the match, surprising the great Oliver Kahn so much with the amount of dip he put into that strike… that he ended up smashing his face on the goalpost… as Lyon eventually finished top of their group…. and even if still, they did go out in the quarters, not only was that their best european performance in history… but in the league… again… with 6 matches left, still second to Monaco, Juninho showed up, scoring in three consecutive matches, clutching the third title in a row, for a club that not only had never won it, but had been in the second tier just 14 years earlier… and yet, it’s only now that I’m gonna get into his prime… You see, the next year, after pestering the board over the fact that it was hard for him to perfect his free kicks when, in France, there wasn’t a standardized ball every club in the league had to use… instead, varying depending on the team… they finally got him one ball of every kind, allowing him to start practicing at least 100 free kicks with every specific ball for the week before each match and… man… he hit a new level… It was 8 free kick goals in just that season and by the end, finally, there was no late season drama, Lyon were 12 points in front, the highest margin in the league’s history and if you asked any of his teammates why… they had one reason… as Fred explained: “I gotta be honest, whenever it was getting hard to break through a low block, we’d start dropping like flies, trying to win a free kick at any cost… because we knew, everytime, Juninho would put us in front”. .
. . and look, I was having a hard time believing this myself… but then I went to check the stats… and out of those 8 free kicks, 6 came when the result was still stuck at nil nil… he wasn’t joking… in fact, after another great Champions League campaign, this time topping a group with Man United in it, not to mention that free kick against Werder Bremen and the fact he got to join Brazil as they won the Confederations Cup… well… by next season, it wasn’t even about the fact that again, 5 out of the 7 free kicks he scored came when the team needed a goal… no… at this point, his teammates were claiming that they were basically playing in easy mode as the defenders had become terrified of giving away free kicks… you gotta realize, that year, they beat Real Madrid 3 nil, with yet another man of the match performance by Juninho, assisting one and smacking in a free kick past Casillas as they topped their group a third time as the man himself took 3 goals and 4 assists in 6 matches, earning a nomination for the Ballon D’Or for the second year in a row and placing 12th, as every journalist in France swore that he was, hands down, a top 5 player in the world… so much so that, as the new year started, they would hand him the captain’s armband, with Juninho then pulling off maybe the greatest free kick of his career against Ajaccio, one so impressive, Benzema had lifted his hands up to the sky in disbelief… eventually taking the league’s player of the year award, leaving Lyon 15 points on top of the league, not just breaking that record again… but making them the first ever team to take 5 French league titles in a row… just as he finally made it into Brazil’s world cup squad… Look, at the tournament, they still seemed hesitant to put him in the starting eleven, but once they did, the result was obvious, a 35 yard thunderbolt to put Brazil in front… but though, after that match, he kept on playing, then it was time for that famous quarter final vs Zidane….
and as much as Brazil lost… No one was indifferent to Juninho, it wasn’t just that he was his team’s best player but the way he cried as the national anthem echoed throughout the stadium… if anyone deserved more from that match, it was him… regardless, there was still a lot waiting for him at Lyon… Another year, 2 more assists against Real as they topped their group one more time, then… a nomination to FIFA World Player Of The Year and another league title… this time, 17 points in front, the record… again… and in 2008, Barcelona would be his victim, with 2 more goals at the highest stage, taking a 7th league title in a row, the record not just for France, but, at the time, for any of the top 5 leagues, the most anyone else had managed… were Real Madrid’s 5 in a row in the 1980s… but… if it was now more than obvious that Juninho was a big fish in a small pound, a player that as I once read: “could have reached the Ballon D’Or podium had he just joined Barcelona”. . .
well, he stayed… and after 7 more free kicks goals, with one of them leaving Victor Valdés holding on to the his net for dear life… Juninho, a true midfielder, left Lyon as their undisputed greatest ever player… having contributed to 41% of the goals scored through that golden era… and to finish things off… he won everything available to him in Qatar, made a return to Vasco da Gama, opened his tally 2 minutes into his first match… with a free kick, pulled off 25 goal contributions in 50 matches, from midfield, at 37 years of age… made a detour to join Henry in the MLS, came back, and 4 months later, as the saying goes, “find something you love and let it kill you”. . .
