STREET FIGHTER
£68m January signing Bruno Fernandes had to battle his way to the top. He’s United’s. . .
SERGIO MARQUES disappears for a moment to find his phone and retrieve a text message from Bruno Fernandes. So when did he last hear from Manchester United’s new signing?
‘Yesterday,’ replies Marques triumphantly as he re-enters the lounge of his apartment brandishing the phone which displays a message in Portuguese from his former protege.
‘Thanks for everything,’ writes Fernandes. ‘I’m good. It’s going to be fine.’
Marques was his first coach in football. They met when Fernandes was eight years old and joined FC Infesta in Matosinhos, north west of Porto.
Marques was the Under 9s coach and saw a gift in Fernandes that convinced him to offer the boy one-to- one sessions on a Tuesday night, honing his skills on the dirt pitch.
‘From the beginning you could see he had a natural talent, but he always wanted the ball for himself,’ says the 65-year-old, who would play Fernandes as a centre back in the harder games and then allow him to dominate in midfield when the opposition were not as strong.
‘He wasn’t very keen on passing, heading and defending. I took him to one side and said, “Bruno, you have the talent but you need to work on these areas. Is that something you want to do?” He said yes and that’s when we started the one-to-one sessions.’
Fernandes comes from a poor background in the industrial city of Maia. He lived with his parents, elder brother Rodrigo and younger sister Sara in a first- floor apartment in Gueifaes, a district on the outskirts of town.
Father Jose worked in the Piu Belle textile factory and neither he nor the boy’s mother Virginia could drive, so Infesta’s club secretary would take Fernandes to the ramshackle stadium.
When the big clubs beckoned two years later, he would have preferred to join his boyhood team Porto but Boavista’s offer of transport to and from training tipped the balance.
Fernandes has never let his slight frame hold him back. Rather shy off the pitch, he became increasingly aggressive on it. When he switched to Boavista’s B-team ADR Pasteleira, driving duties fell to his Under 15 coach Antonio Peres six nights a week. So did the task of taming the fiery youngster.
‘He was like a wild horse,’ says Peres. ‘He had long hair and he was a rebel. He learned to play football in the street and his fight, his character, his language came from the streets.
‘There was a lot of competition for places and sometimes he would go over the top in training. He would fight with his team-mates and I had to send him out of the session to cool off.
‘He told me many times he wanted to be a top player to get a better life because the family was poor. Everyone wants that, but only a few can get it.’
Fernandes was a bad loser but also a natural leader from an early age.
Peres laughs as he recalls him being a ringleader when Pasteleira left away games with a few more footballs than when they arrived, or the times when he caught the boys watching films instead of sleeping the night before a tournament.
What, adult movies? ‘No, no, no, no — well, maybe!’
At Fernandes’ old school, his English teacher Cristina Almeida remembers a boy whose only dream was
to be a footballer and one day play in the Premier League. ‘He was a special one,’ she says. ‘I can still see him running to the classroom, the football under his arm, sweating and panting and me making him wash his face before going to his place.
‘He had a hard time balancing his studies with training and matches, let alone homework. Sometimes he couldn’t do it so I would get angry and say, “Bruno, do you think you’re going to be another Cristiano Ronaldo? Do you? Forget the football, do your homework and study. That is your future”.
‘He used to look down and nod in silence. Luckily for him and the rest of us, I was wrong!’
Fernandes moved to another school closer to Boavista at the age of 15, when he met his future wife Ana Pinho. She remembers them kissing for the first time in front of a gum shop close to the school.
Her brother Miguel became his agent and it was on his recommendation that Italian club Novara decided to take a look.
Novara’s sporting director Cristiano Giaretta des - patched the head of his academy, Mauro Borghetti, to Portugal to watch Fernandes play for Boavista Under 17s.
‘At first glance he didn’t impress me,’ Borghetti recalls. ‘ He wasn’ t above average and even the movement of his body didn’t show great athleticism.
‘But during the game, I realised that his play was full of personality. He had no fear of dribbling or shooting.’
Novara agreed to pay Boavista a total of £33,500 in two instalments and it says much about Fernandes’ character that he was prepared to leave home at the age of 17 and move to Italy.
Juventus and Fiorentina were also hovering, but the teenager saw a better prospect of first- team football in Serie B with Novara. Fernandes scored a hat-trick in his first game for the Under 19s but had to wait several months for his senior debut.
By then, money was tight because paperwork issues over his first professional contract meant that his basic wage of £1,260 a month wasn’t paid until midway through the season.
‘From June to February, I had €50 that my mother gave me when I left Portugal,’ Fernandes told Portuguese newspaper Record.
‘Arriving in Novara, not knowing anyone, not talking the language, having no one who could translate what had to be done — it was difficult.’ Fernandes’ parents and Ana visited him four times during his year at the club and he worked hard to settle in at the Hotel Novarello, his home at Novara’s training complex in Piedmont.
Giaretta describes a fiercely dedicated teenager who was regularly first in and last out at training.
Better still, he mastered Italian quickly by writing words on bits of paper stuck to everything in
his apartment. ‘On the chair, the fridge, the wardrobe, everywhere,’ says Giaretta. ‘After one month, he was already able to speak Italian and this was really impressive to me. ‘He was different to the other guys. I’ve never known a player with so much desire to be the best. ‘He wants to be someone. Not just one of the best, but the best. Playing for Manchester United is a way of doing that.’ There were up to 20 other young players staying with Fernandes at Novarello. They remember
him sulking for two hours at a time if he lost at table tennis or table football.
‘He wouldn’t accept defeat in training matches, either,’ adds Borghetti.
‘When he arrived in Novara, we hoped he would get into the first team. Then we were all his fans when he made his debut in Serie A. We saw him score in the Europa League and play in the World Cup with Ronaldo.
‘Now he plays for one of the most important clubs in the world. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if he won the Ballon d’Or, too!’
Fernandes’ natural talents continued to blossom at Novara — the dribbling, the passing, the blockbuster long-range shots and set-piece deliveries.
It all earned him a move to Udinese, getting a pay rise and a Smart car into the bargain.
For the first few months, Fernandes’ pet labrador Simba kept him company but the dog was sent home to Maia when Ana joined Bruno permanently in Italy.
She was able to cook his favourite dish, the francesinha, a meat and cheese sandwich served with French fries that is popular in Porto and so stodgy that he is only allowed it once a month. The couple married in 2015 while he was at Udinese and their daughter, Matilde, was born two years later.
By then, Fernandes had moved to Sampdoria, but he only spent one season there before returning to Portugal with Sporting Lisbon.
It was at Sporting that he truly came of age.
Captain. Talisman. Star player. Fernandes finished last season with 32 goals and 18 assists, establishing himself as the most productive midfielder in Europe. He lifted the Portuguese
Cup and two Portuguese League Le Cups in Lisbon, but was at the centre of a controversy last year when a WhatsApp audio of him ranting about team-mates was w leaked. ‘ Some players have no fight and don’t want to be here — they can f***k off,’ Fernandes was heard saying. It was telling, however, that the rest of the squad still backed him. He was also caught on CCTV swearing at a security guard after lashing out with his right boot at a door when he was sent off on his return to Boavista in September, the wild horse still packing a kick. It followed a summer of speculation over a move to England — to United or Tottenham. Sporting were ready to sell their crown jewel to help keep the club afloat but were holding out for a fee of £66.5million. ‘We had a cash-flow requirement of £95.5m and Bruno was key to this,’ revealed Sporting president Frederico Varandas last week.
UNITEd
revived their interest in January under pressure to deliver a new signing and, in particular, a player such as Fernandes who could ignite their faltering attack.
They agreed to pay an initial £46.6m and a further £21.2m could be due in bonuses — including an instalment if he wins the Ballon d’Or.
Those who have followed his career would not rule it out.
Fernandes broke down in tears in his farewell TV interview in Portugal and Sporting fans wept with him, but the player has got his dream move at the age of 25.
He touched down in Manchester by private jet with Ana, Matilde and his agent Miguel Pinho on January 29 and made his debut in a goalless draw with Wolves three days later.
A promising start saw Fernandes complete more passes and fire off more shots than any of his team-mates.
Tonight even more will be expected from his first away game against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge after a week integrating with the rest of the United squad at a warm-weather training camp in Marbella.
Naturally, Fernandes gravitated towards United’s Portuguese-speaking players — diogo dalot, Fred and Andreas Pereira — but he chose a Spanish song for his initiation in front of the squad on Monday night and the Spanish contingent joined in with the chorus.
If he can call the tune on the pitch as well, United may just have found their man in the boy from Maia.