From Angolan refugee camp to Champions League winner

Real star Camavinga on how football saved him

ON a manicured lawn in front of the main entrance to Real Madrid’s huge training complex on the outskirts of the city, Eduardo Camavinga is posing for photos. The mountain air from the nearby snow-capped Sierra Guadarrama is rich and there is a calming silence — this is a footballer’s paradise, as far from where it all began for the 20-year-old as is possible to imagine. ‘I wasn’t even two years old. I don’t remember anything about it,’ he says of spending the first months of his life in a refugee camp in angola until his parents took him and his siblings to France. ‘We haven’t talked much about it. Things were difficult in angola because of the war and my family came to France to make a better life. I’ve seen pictures of when we arrived and I’m still a baby.’ Last May, parents Celestino and Sofia were at the Champions League final to see their son win the tournament in his first season at Real Madrid. ‘Football is my life,’ he says of the way his talent has transformed his family’s fortunes. He was a late substitute in the 1-0 win over Liverpool at the Stade de France but his role on the road to the final had been huge. When he was off the pitch in the second legs against Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea and Manchester City, the aggregate score was 4-0 against Madrid. When he was on the pitch, the balance was 8-1 in their favour. ‘Those numbers are good but it’s just a statistic,’ he smiles. ‘When the manager puts me on he tells me to get on the ball and energise the team.’ He certainly did that in the semi-final against City. With Madrid’s iconic trio of Casemiro, Toni Kroos and Luka Modric off the pitch, it was Camavinga’s driving run on 92 minutes that led to the penalty won and scored by Karim Benzema to put Madrid in the final. ‘I saw the City game on TV after and it’s 99 per cent certain that City will go through and just one per cent that we could go through. But Madrid is never dead, no matter what the probabilities are. ‘People wrote us off, but here you learn to play until the final whistle. What happened last season will stay with me for the rest of my life.’ after the final, he says he even enjoyed the obligatory town hall meet-and-greets that the more seasoned winners could be forgiven for finding tiresome. ‘I was asking Karim, “OK so what do we do now? Where do we go now?”’ he says. There is a changing of the guard in midfield with Casemiro now in Manchester and Kroos and Modric in the last year of their contracts. Camavinga is his own man but there is no harm in him aspiring to emulate the other three. ‘I love the way Casemiro defends, the way Luka runs with the ball, and the quality of Toni’s passes,’ he says. He would also welcome competition from Jude Bellingham if he were to pick Madrid over English suitors this summer. ‘It’s normal the best players come to Madrid. Competition is good. I have to prove myself on the pitch every time I play.’ He first proved himself aged seven in a tournament for his school in Fougeres in the north of France. ‘Zinedine Zidane was my idol. He was everyone’s idol. I did the roulette skill I’d seen on a Zidane YouTube video. My teacher urged my mother to get me in a team.’ Despite being keener on judo, Camavinga’s parents signed him up for his local side, where he shone until Rennes signed him aged 11. He was in their first team aged 16, and by the age of 18, Madrid had paid ¤40million for him. ‘My father told me that I was the person who was going to lift the family up. They’re proud of me,’ he says. Camavinga (left) credits them for most things, even his incredible energy levels late in games. ‘It’s a mental thing,’ he says. ‘It’s thanks to my father — hearing his voice saying the tiredness is in the mind.’ When asked if his family’s early struggles make him recoil at some of the over-indulgences of other players, he says: ‘If you have money you can do whatever you want with it. You can buy five cars and be a fantastic person. I wouldn’t go that way. I have my father close and if I buy too many things he’d kill me!’ Visiting angola is one of the things Camavinga hopes to achieve this year. Right now, he wants to start a dialogue on the racism that still blights Spanish football. ‘We all have to talk about it and isolate the idiot who doesn’t like someone just because they have different coloured skin,’ he says. You wonder if he took a moment in Paris last May to consider his remarkable journey so far. Then you remember his age. When the future is so bright, there is little need to dwell on the past. ‘I live life as it happens,’ he says. ‘I just enjoyed the moment. I’ll think about it a lot more when I’m older. It was my first year and I’d won the Champions League. Rather than reflect, I just want to win another.’