Meet Endrick. He’s a striker for Palmeiras. Small at about 5ft 6in, left-footed, hell of a shot on him.
He’s being courted by just about every big European club you can think of. He’s been on the front page of Marca at least three times in the last few months, including one particularly meta example which featured him holding up two of its previous covers on which he featured. You may have seen a goal of his in January, when an overhead kick against Oeste went semi-viral. Gary Lineker tweeted, praising Endrick’s abilities.
— MARCA (@marca) January 31, 2022
He’s also 15 years old.
Endrick hasn’t played a single senior competitive game for Palmeiras and hasn’t signed a full-time, professional contract for them either. That’s because he’s not allowed to. Too young. All things being well, pen will meet paper on or pretty soon after his 16th birthday in July but to date, his promise and reputation are based on youth football.
⚠️ ATENÇÃO, ALERTA DE GOLAÇO PASSANDO NA SUA TIMELINE ⚠️#AvantiPalestra pic.twitter.com/pENra02Kzs
— SE Palmeiras (@Palmeiras) January 19, 2022
And yet, the common consensus is that he is the next big thing in Brazilian football. Or at least, one of the next big things in Brazilian football.
His performances in the youth ranks at Palmeiras already had attracted plenty of interest, but after six goals in seven games of the recent Copinha (an annual Sao Paulo tournament for under-20s teams), including that remarkable overhead kick and the opener as Palmeiras beat Santos 4-0 in the final, the orderly queue of top clubs turned into a scrum.
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There were calls for Palmeiras to take him to the recent Club World Cup. Some have even urged Tite to pick him for the World Cup in Qatar. On Saturday, he was called up for the Brazil under-17s squad.
It is, admittedly, a little strange that we know who Endrick is, given his age.
This is partly a consequence of the biggest clubs in Europe not wanting to miss out on the next superstar, wanting the next Vinicius Junior, whose 2018 move from Rio de Janeiro’s Flamengo to Real Madrid for €45 million was arranged when he wasn’t much older than Endrick is now.
However strange it is for us, it must be much stranger for Endrick himself.
“I never thought this was going to happen,” he tells The Athletic, in his first interview with an English-language outlet.
“It (being well-known) is not the most important thing. The most important thing is to keep playing football. I haven’t achieved anything yet. It’s a little funny sometimes, but I forget about it. Sometimes, I remember — like when my Instagram followers went up by 10 times in a few months (his follower count now stands at 810,000).
“Things like that are strange. But I know it’s only the start of my journey: there’s a larger purpose for my life, and that’s the most important part. That is my focus: not on being a celebrity.”
Endrick’s upbringing was reasonably typical for a depressing proportion of Brazilian children. He grew up in poverty in Brasilia, the nation’s federal capital. His father, Douglas Sousa, has spoken before about the times that Endrick came asking for food, and there was none to give him.
“It was difficult,” says Endrick. “The first word that comes to mind is ‘strength’. I had to be strong to survive, to go through everything I had to go through.”
Dad Douglas tells a few stories about how he knew, from a very early age, that Endrick was special.
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Douglas played football to a reasonable standard himself, and when a four-year-old Endrick would accompany him to games, he could imitate some of the moves and skills that the adults would do.
At six, he started training in football schools, playing with kids his own age, but he was so good his coach would only let him use his right foot. Then, in a game when he was nine, and playing for an under-11s team, 1-0 down in a local final, he was brought on with 10 minutes to go, scored the equaliser, then dribbled from halfway to get the winner in added time.
“That’s when I said, ‘Yes, he’s unbelievable’,” Douglas says.
Some of these stories may have gained a little flourish as time has gone on, and the knowledge that Douglas started uploading clips of Endrick playing football from the age of seven onto YouTube (primarily, Douglas says, in the hope that Cristiano Ronaldo would see them) shows you that the father is keen to tell the world about the son’s talent. But the stories do emphasise what is obvious: the kid is special.
Brasilia does not have much of a football tradition. It doesn’t have a club of note. Kaka is from nearby, as is fellow World Cup-winner Lucio, but both got their breaks in the game elsewhere.
So when Endrick was 11, the family moved 600 miles south to Sao Paulo, where he was signed by Palmeiras.
Douglas initially made and sold coffee and cakes at a railway station — to make ends meet, but, he says, also to emphasise to Endrick that the family were not relying on his footballing talent to survive.
After his son joined Palmeiras, Douglas worked as a janitor at their training ground.
Nevertheless, you would think there must be some pressure on him to succeed. “I don’t feel pressure or responsibility for my family. God has all the answers and God has written my path. I have to work my hardest, and what should be, will be. I don’t feel it’s my responsibility, I don’t carry that weight on my shoulders when I play.”
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Douglas also tells a story of a weekend when Endrick had training.
It was a Saturday morning, and the boy didn’t want to go. Rather than playing the role of the classic pushy parent, Douglas said that he didn’t have to attend if he didn’t want to. He didn’t even have to be a footballer if he didn’t want to. They had family back in Brasilia, so they could move back there and they would figure it out.
Endrick went to training.
It’s obviously difficult to tell from one interview, but from that, from hearing stories and from talking to those around him, this isn’t a kid who acts like he’s 15 years old.
Take his answer when asked to describe his own game. “I’m a hard-working player, Persistent. I always want more. I am focused on goalscoring — I always want to score more goals. The key for me is always wanting more, always wanting the unreachable: there’s never a point that I don’t want something more.
“I’ll always fight. I’ll be persistent and try until the last minute I’m in the game. I never give up, I pressure defenders, I run more than anyone else on the pitch.”
If you were given that quote without knowing what kind of player it referred to, you’d think someone closer to Dirk Kuyt than, say, Neymar. It’s perhaps one reason why Endrick has dealt with the pressure he’s come under so far, and will be able to in the future. “Before every game, I feel butterflies in my stomach. But then, when I walk onto the pitch, I forget everything and block everything out. I feel anxiety before games — it matters what happens during the game, so I feel that sort of pressure. Whatever I feel before the game, I can shut it off when the game starts.”
That final Copinha was played in front of 30,000 people. The other thing to remember is that the last couple of years of Endrick’s development have happened during the pandemic, so to play before that sort of crowd could have been quite a shock to the system. “Each time we’ve challenged him, he’s responded,” Joao Paulo Sampaio, Palmeiras’ youth football co-ordinator, told the BBC recently.
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Despite all of this, it still feels slightly odd that we know who this kid is. He is, after all, quite literally still a child.
To emphasise the point, he took a trip to Europe last month and, between attending Paris Saint-Germain vs Real Madrid in the Champions League and Barcelona’s Europa League clash with Napoli at the Nou Camp, he went to Disneyland Paris.
His fame in Brazil is such that he’s already doing endorsements and commercials, which you can look at in a couple of ways: one, with caution and scepticism, particularly having watched the recent Neymar documentary which exposed the problems with a footballer becoming a commodity from an early age. But on the other hand, this is an insurance policy, a way of making some money now so that, if things don’t go to plan and he doesn’t turn out to be a global superstar, he’ll have a little security.
Is it healthy? Should we know all of this? Should we be interviewing him?
It’s tricky, not least because there are many cautionary tales — other Brazilian youngsters who were hyped as the next superstar of the game, only to disappear; the easy narrative being that they had too much, too young.
Of the ones that reached beyond Brazilian borders, Kerlon springs to mind — the supposed thrilling talent for Cruzeiro and “seal dribbler”, whose trick of juggling the ball on his forehead went viral before going viral was really a thing. He moved to Italy with Inter Milan in 2008 at the age of 20, barely played in Serie A and spent the next decade wandering around various unsuccessful loans and short stints in Japan, the US and Malta before retiring in 2017 after a spell playing in Slovakia.
Then there’s Keirrison, a Palmeiras starlet Barcelona paid €14 million for in 2009, but who never actually played a first-team game for them.
At the more extreme end is Breno, a defender who was subject of a bidding war as a teenager from European clubs and ended up signing for Bayern Munich in 2008, but injuries scuppered his time there and he ended up being convicted of arson in a German court.
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A more obscure example, to European eyes at least, is Jean Chera.
In the first decade of this century, Santos had a trio of incredibly talented youngsters in their system, and there was plenty of debate over which one was going to be the best. Jean Chera left in 2011 after his father fell out with the club’s hierarchy, got through four more clubs before he made a senior appearance and ended up retiring aged just 24 to become an eSports player.
The other two Santos starlets were a little older: one was Ganso, who didn’t quite live up to the hype but went on to have a respectable career, the other was Neymar.
The theory is that things will be different for Endrick. Whereas the common factor with many of those cautionary tales is bad or self-interested counsel, his family are being advised by the agency who manage Vinicius Junior and Arsenal’s Gabriel Martinelli, players Endrick describes as “role models”.
That tells you a couple of things: first, that as with most talented Brazilian youngsters, the goal is for him to play in Europe, sooner rather than later, but also that he has a better chance of picking the right club and making that move work, given the success both of those players have enjoyed. Theoretically, he’s with the right people.
For his part, he says that step across the Atlantic isn’t at the front of his mind just yet.
“It’s natural for any Brazilian kid to want to go to Europe, because that’s where the most important games and competitions are. But I don’t think about it too much. It’s not my next step. My next step is to play well for Palmeiras. I know that to be able to play in Europe, I have to perform to a high level at Palmeiras, and to play for Palmeiras I have to be outstanding for the youth team.
“The next step is to be a great player for Palmeiras, because Palmeiras was the club that bet on me and gave structure to my family to be the player I am.
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“I would never choose a club over another club, or a league over another league, because it always depends more on who will want me. I have to concentrate on what I have to do now.”
At the time of writing his professional deal with Palmeiras is still being ironed out, and while Europe’s biggest clubs would probably take him tomorrow (and if you support one of those big teams and are wondering if your lot are interested: yes, they are), The Athletic understands serious discussions won’t start for a while yet.
He can’t actually officially move until he’s 18, and while Vinicius Junior’s Real Madrid transfer was agreed a year in advance, a lead-in to a transfer any longer than that could be tricky.
There is an acknowledgement that a move to Europe is inevitable. Spain is the assumed destination for some, and the usual giddier elements of the Madrid-based press seem to think he will sign for Real.
Although, when talking to The Athletic, Endrick speaks with more enthusiasm about English football. “I watch the Premier League a lot. It’s a vibrant game, and the results are often unexpected, while in other leagues you know who’s going to win, most of the time.”
And so this is Endrick.
It still feels strange talking about someone so young in terms that one might talk about someone much older.
But there’s every chance you’ll be hearing an awful lot more about him, and pretty soon.
Remember the name.
(Main graphic — photo: Getty Images/design: Tom Slator)