The making of Arsenal’s little midfield dynamo
Lucas Torreira has had to work for his success – with a little help from home, reports Sam Dean
‘Lucas was never shy. He always stood out for being a little leader’
Eight years ago, in the Uruguayan town of Fray Bentos, word came through that Lucas Torreira was in trouble. Barely a teenager, he had recently left for the bustling city of Montevideo, where he had joined the youth team of Penarol in pursuit of a professional contract. It was a big club, a big city and a big opportunity. But now little Lucas was a long way from home, and a long way from help.
Torreira was supposed to be lodging in the capital, but it soon emerged that circumstances had changed and accommodation could no longer be provided. All of a sudden, Torreira had nowhere to go and no money to make the 200-mile journey home.
When the news reached the Institucion Atletica 18 de Julio, Torreira’s boyhood club, there was no hesitation. “We had a collection between the directors to manage the expenses and the paperwork needed to bring Lucas back,” says Hugo Ruiz, the club’s sporting co-ordinator. “I remember seeing on his face a mixture of gratitude and emotion that I still see now.”
That gratitude can also be seen on the back of Torreira’s right leg, where a tattoo of 18 de Julio’s crest is visible whenever he rolls down his socks. “He lived his whole childhood here,” Ruiz says. “His love for the club is unconditional.”
That tattoo no doubt serves as a reminder to Torreira of what he went through in those early days. It is a permanent marker of those first steps he took on a journey that has carried him from Uruguay to Italy and then on to Arsenal, where he has already been hailed as the combative midfielder the fans have craved for years.
It has taken just 11 appearances for Torreira to demonstrate why Arsenal were willing to pay Sampdoria a total of £26.4million – £4.4million more than his release clause
– for his services. This season, Arsenal have played 442 minutes without the 22-year-old in the side, and 548 with him. Without him, they have scored nine goals and conceded 10. With him, they have scored 20 and conceded three.
It has been, by almost any measure, a remarkable start to life in a new league. But it is little more than would have been expected by those who have witnessed Torreira’s footballing transformation.
“Lucas was never shy,” says Ruiz, thinking back to Torreira’s childhood years at 18 de Julio, when he was half the size of many of his team-mates (he is only 5ft 6in now) but twice as vocal. “He always stood out from his colleagues for being a little leader. He was used to playing with people bigger than him. It was just a matter of having that bit of luck to get to the big clubs.”
Torreira would have been forgiven for thinking his luck had run out when he was forced to return from Montevideo at the age of 14. But he regrouped and went back to the capital three years later to play for Montevideo Wanderers. Once there, he lived with his sister, who worked in a shopping centre, and he would save money by carrying his meals around in plastic containers.
It was from Montevideo that Torreira was taken to Italy, to trial alongside a small group of Uruguayans. He was not originally on the list of players invited to Europe, but he soon became the last man standing.
The scout who spotted Torreira, then a 17-year-old forward, was Pescara’s Roberto Druda. “His most impressive qualities were his close control, eye for goal and streetwise attitude,” Druda says. “But his defensive ability emerged as an unexpected gift.”
Those gifts were unearthed by Massimo Oddo, a World Cup winner with Italy who was managing Pescara Under-19s when Druda delivered Torreira. “I remember during this period of transformation, Oddo told me: ‘If you explain a tactical movement to Lucas once, he will put it into practice for ever’. In this growth phase, I thought he might be interesting for Juventus as a replacement for Andrea Pirlo.”
By the time Oddo had been promoted to first-team manager in May 2015, Torreira was ready to step up. And yet his rapid development did nothing to soften the emotional pain of leaving his family. “In his first year at Pescara, Lucas suffered from homesickness,” Druda says. “He missed his friends, his family, his land.” In fear of losing him, Pescara would sometimes host Torreira’s father and brothers in Italy. “We had to make sure he did not give up on his dream,” Druda says.
Sampdoria came calling in July 2015, signing Torreira for around £1million but loaning him back to Pescara for another season. By now he was already being compared with Marco Verratti, the Paris Saint-germain midfielder who had begun his career at Pescara, and it did not take long for Torreira to impress after making the move. Over the next two seasons, he made more tackles than any midfielder in Serie A. “If Torreira were 1.8 metres tall, he would already cost €100 million and would be considered among the strongest playmakers in the world,” said Marco Giampaolo, the Sampdoria manager, last season.
“He’ll go to a big club that does not care so much about his stature.”
Torreira impressed at the World Cup, and there is such warmth towards him in his homeland that one article in the Republica newspaper this summer was headlined: “The little Pacman who won the hearts of the Uruguayans.”
After Russia, and before pre-season with Arsenal, Torreira returned to Fray Bentos, where he has bought a butcher’s shop for his family.
On his arrival, he was mobbed by children at the airport. “When you are a child and you dream of these things, everything seems very far away,” he said during that brief journey home. “It’s amazing to see the affection. It’s something I have earned through a lot of sacrifice.
“I want to share happiness with them because they know how difficult everything was for me.”