As a youth player in Italy, Jorginho was once tricked by his advisor. After that he wanted to stop playing football for a short time.
Jorginho was in complete disarray. “At this point I wanted to give up,” the midfield strategist of Chelsea FC, today worth more than 60 million euros, is quoted on the official website of the Blues: “I was devastated, I was fed up.”
At that time Jorginho was still far from earning big money with football. A few years earlier, he had come to Italy from his home in Brazil, from the small coastal town of Imbituba. With 15 years, to a foreign country, to a foreign continent, for the big dream.
Two years earlier, an agent had discovered 13-year-old Jorginho at a youth tournament in Brazil and taken him into his football school.
Now he saw the time ripe for the talented boy to attempt a professional career in Europe. “He gave me a trial training in a young Hellas Verona team and they took me,” recalls Jorginho.
In the beginning it went smoothly in Verona, Jorginho finally lived his dream, everything was new and exciting.
“But then a routine arose: Training, school, home, school, training. For 18 months, that was all I did. I had only 20 Euro per week at my disposal and couldn’t do anything else anyway. Training and school was everything. That was really hard,” says the 27-year-old.
In addition, Hellas’ first team did not play in Serie A at the time, there were problems with the junior teams and Jorginho had to play temporarily for the youth of the small neighbouring club Berretti. There, with Berretti, he met Rafael, also Brazilian and goalkeeper in that team.
“He asked me how I was doing, how long I had been in Italy and I told him that I lived on 20 euros a week. He said that something couldn’t be right, did some research, and finally it turned out that my consultant was siphoning money off my salary without my knowledge.”
An info that hit Jorginho’s heart and robbed him of his belief in a future in football: “I called home in tears and told my mother that I wanted to come home and no longer play football,” he looks back.
But his mother, who had always encouraged him and often trained him on the beach herself, convinced him to continue: “She said: ‘Don’t even think about it! You’re so close and you’ve been there a few years now, I’m not letting you back in the house. You have to stay and bite your way through.”
Jorginho listened to his mother’s advice, but he did not reach his goal yet. He trained with Hellas shortly thereafter with the first team, but was then awarded to a fourth division team. When he came back, the coach only bet on him after two players had injured themselves in his position.
“The coach didn’t know what to do. He had to either improvise or bet on me. He bet on me and I must have done my thing pretty well,” says Jorginho.
Jorginho was 19 years old when he made his debut for Hellas in the B series. It was not until 2013, at the age of 21, that he made his first game in Serie A after his promotion with Hellas, and then moved to Naples just six months later.
There, Jorginho developed into a world-class midfielder and went to Chelsea last summer for 57 million euros. In addition, Italy’s national team now has 16 appearances.
