How fairy-tale of United’s new darling began in Italian backwater
EIGHT years on, Cristiano Giaretta allows his mind to wander. ‘Sometimes I close my eyes and go back to the past, thinking about Bruno and when we bought him,’ he says. ‘We were undecided: do we want to spend this money, or not?’
That decision in 2012 would shape the future of both Bruno Fernandes, then 17, and Novara Calcio — a Serie B side in need of inspiration. Giaretta was their sporting director.
‘In my role, you can imagine how many agents there are and how many of them keep proposing players,’ he says. ‘It’s up to you to understand, with experience, which you can trust.’
On this occasion, his judgment was sound. At the behest of Fernandes’ brother-in-law Miguel Pinho, Giaretta flew to Portugal to watch the teenager play for the Boavista youth team.
He liked what he saw. Better still, the asking price was within their budget. ‘But at our small club, in the second division… €40,000 (£36,400) is not a small amount,’ says Giaretta.
‘You always have concerns about guys who are very young, who change country. They move and don’t know the language… but it was a risk we wanted to face.’
It was a leap of faith for Fernandes, too. He was leaving his family and girlfriend Ana behind and turning his back on interest from Juventus and Fiorentina. ‘Not knowing anyone, not speaking the language, having no one who could translate what had to be done, it was very difficult,’ said Fernandes later.
‘This is where the history of Bruno started,’ says Giaretta. ‘[It] is like a movie, a fantasy. I’m very satisfied for him, for me and for Novara. It’s a great tale.’
Fernandes was one of the first foreign players Novara signed to their academy. Others soon followed but, according to former academy chief Mauro Borghetti, none has made such an impact.
‘In the opening minutes of his first home game with the Under-19s against Sampdoria, he nutmegged an opponent,’
Borghetti remembers. From there the star of this ‘respectful, polite boy’ with no shortage of confidence only rose.
‘What immediately struck you with Bruno was his great personality on the field, even with bigger players.’
Within months, Fernandes had graduated to the first team and hauled them towards the top tier.
The following summer, Giaretta’s eye for talent earned him a promotion, too. He went to Udinese and took Fernandes with him. After the midfielder appeared in front of the English cameras this year, they were back in touch. ‘It’s not so common that a player that plays in Italy, from Portugal... and immediately speaks such good English,’ says Giaretta.
It is familiar for Fernandes, though. In Novara, he was never without an Italian dictionary. The teenager watched local TV, read Italian books and plastered his room with Post-it Notes of vocabulary. Within a few months he had mastered his adopted tongue and dragged Novara up the table. No surprise, then, that United have seen such immediate results.
When he was at Novara, Fernandes lived at the club’s training base and for eight months he lived off £45 a week from his mother after paperwork issues meant his £1,260-a-month wage wasn’t paid until part-way through the season. But this straitened existence spoke more to Fernandes’ maturity and resolve.
‘I’ve never seen a player focus on football like him,’ Giaretta says. ‘The determination at 17 is not normal… he was an adult.’
Fernandes demanded extra individual training and stood out in group sessions. ‘He was very smart to understand tactical instructions even when he didn’t know the language,’ Giaretta says. Initially, the coach asked players not to translate. ‘I prefer that you struggle a little bit more,’ Fernandes was told.
‘With Bruno we never had a problem. He was the ideal young player,’ Giaretta says. ‘Normally you have to follow them, speak with them about some rules or behaviour.’
As for the hallmarks of his game — fine set-piece delivery, clever movement and an eye for the killer pass — they were already evident, too.
‘He’s the player I remember,’
Giaretta says. says ‘The only thing you have to do is say, “Bruno go on to the pitch and enjoy it”.’
But there remained one issue. ‘Physically he was light,’ Giaretta explains. And Serie B was an unforgiving league. ‘[It’s] like the Championship’.
Should they add bulk to his brains and risk ‘ruining’ the player? ‘He was so skilful, we didn’t want to touch a perfect player,’ Giaretta explains.
‘Bruno was completely different from every other player I’d had in the past — and I still have currently — because of his brain and his mentality,’ Giaretta says. ‘The smartest guy I’ve ever met at 17, 18, 19.’
Fernandes was ruthlessly competitive, too, and didn’t take well defeats in training, or at table tennis and table football.
He was soon admired by teammates and reportedly dubbed ‘the Maradona of Novara’ by local press.
Already at United, he is earning comparisons to Eric Cantona. To those in Novara, however, he remains the ‘kind’ boy who arrived in 2012.
‘Novara was an opportunity for Bruno to make himself known,’ Borghetti says. ‘No one had believed in him until then. His brilliant career began in Novara.’
Giaretta agrees. ‘He knows it was very important for him,’ he says. ‘What I see now is only a much better, more confident player [who] is not 17 any more.’
THE ITALIAN PRESS CALLED FERNANDES THE MARADONA OF NOVARA