Firmino's journey to Liverpool's next big hope

The £29m international, signed during the Copa America from under the noses of other interested parties, is starting to come of age in the Premier League and against Newcastle United on Sunday much will be expected of him again. In the anticipated absence of his injured compatriot Philippe Coutinho it is Firmino to whom Liverpool will look creatively to continue the Klopp renaissance.

Liverpool’s new manager knows all about Firmino – in fact there is an argument for saying he knows him better than any other player in the squad he inherited from Brendan Rodgers. Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund faced Firmino’s Hoffenheim nine times in Germany during the Brazilian’s four full seasons at the club, including three games last season with a cup tie in which the latter scored but ended up on the losing side.

The acquisition of the 24-year-old was part of what later convinced Klopp that Liverpool had a squad of players with which he could work and when you see the speed of Firmino’s progress in Germany it is not hard to see why. The boy from the beach city of Maceio in north-east Brazil came to snowy Hoffenheim just a few months after his 19th birthday and was in the first team within three months – way ahead of schedule.

By his third season he was voted the league’s breakthrough player and come last summer, Ian Ayre, the Liverpool chief executive, went to Santiago where the Brazil team were based determined to come back with his signature. Then, when Klopp arrived, the player felt it would have a transformative effect on his own career.

“I was really happy,” he says. “I hadn’t really been playing up to that point and he knew me and I knew him. We get on well. He gets on with all the players. He has made a really good impression. The German mentality is really good and it is something that I also have a bit of too.

“I speak German to him but I can understand a lot of English already because I am studying. He’s an excellent coach. He managed Dortmund and has won titles in the Bundesliga, which is very difficult. He has always been really competitive in the Champions League … he’s having an effect already. I think we can achieve things.

“His Dortmund team were difficult to play against. They defended very well and they were good on the ball. I have played against him and scored against Dortmund. I made assists against them. I have good memoires. From now on I hope we can do some of that together.”
We are talking after training at Melwood with the help of the Brazilian journalist Joao Castelo-Branco, ESPN Brazil’s UK correspondent who is teasing Firmino’s life-story out of him. It is, we both agree, the classic Brazilian footballer’s story. His father Jose Roberto was an “ambulante”, a street hawker who would sell drinks from his cart outside concerts and festivals. His mother Maria Cicera looked after young Roberto and his sister and they were, by his own admission, a poor family.

He misses Maceio, one of those north-east Brazilian cities known for its beautiful beaches and, Firmino admits, its gang violence. His story is one of pure sacrifice to play at the highest level. He started off in the youth system of Maceio’s Club De Regatas Brasil, known as CRB, in the second tier of Brazilian football and, via a failed trial at Sao Paulo, moved the length of the country to Figueirense, in Florianopolis, to pursue his dream.

“It was really difficult to leave my family to go south and my mother cried every day. From the moment I left CRB I was away from my family for a year. For a 16-year-old, that’s quite difficult. But that is life. You have to chase your dreams and thankfully I am here today. I went to the youth team at Figueirense first. Then I played for a year and a half in Serie B [the Brazilian championship second tier]. We got promoted and then I went to Germany.

“When I was a kid, sometimes mum and dad didn’t really want me to play football. They wanted me to study. Occasionally they would even lock me in at home and I would have to jump the wall at the back to play football! But today I am here, and I am thankful of that. My mum remembers those times. She mentions it sometimes. I tell her it was for a good cause!”

His parents will be over for Christmas, his first without a winter break, and both their faces are inked on the right arm of their son whose tattoos creep up his neck and across his knuckles. He has had to grow up fast, and rattles off the names of people who helped him through the early stages of his career when he struggled to stand out among the crowds of talented young Brazilian players.

His first agent, Dr Marcelo Portela, was also his dentist. His second was the former player Luciano Bilu. At his trial for Sao Paulo he said he barely saw the ball in two weeks and when he was given another chance with a trial at Figurense, he knew he had to take it. “On the first day I scored two overhead kicks. That floored everyone!” he says. “So by Day Two, I knew I was in.”

His determination and his ambition, which he refers to more than once in our conversation, is evident. Were there any doubts about joining Hoffenheim? “I thought, ‘I’m definitely going’,” he replies. “I was never scared. I was always very decisive. I knew I wanted to go. I knew it would be hard with the weather and the language and the culture. But I went as a ‘guerreiro’ [a warrior] and overcame the challenge.”

The village team Hoffenheim, from south of Frankfurt, punch way above their weight and it must have been a strange place for a Brazilian kid a long way from home but he stuck it out, even the -15C winters which he says came as a shock. After the World Cup finals, the new Brazil manager Dunga gave him his international debut and he already knew Coutinho by the time Liverpool’s interest became serious.

“He [Coutinho] was very honest with me. He said the weather here – not just Liverpool but England – was not very good. He said it rains all day and now I can see that it really does rain a lot. But he also said the club is like a family, that the players are very nice - and I trusted him on that. I really wanted to come.”

He is here with his wife Larissa, and although there is much that is new, there is also the familiarity of Klopp’s approach. “He has that German pressing game,” Firmino says. “We have taken that and put it into practice already, in just one month. I like his philosophy.”

Source: Telegraph

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