Adriano Leite (42), former Brazilian international who lived his best years as a footballer in the Inter Milan In the 2000s, he fell into a bottomless pit in which alcohol ended up destroying a life, his own, which in his own words was never ideal. “I’m obsessed with wasting my life,” he said in ‘The Players Tribune’.
Former footballer for Flamengo, Fiorentina, Parma, San Pablo, Roma and Corinthians, among others, Adriano talks about the unhappiness that accompanied his professional life, the traumas of his family and the need to always return to the dangerous favela of his childhood. He has done so on the eve of the launch of his biography ‘Meu Medo Maior’ (‘My greatest fear’).
“Being a promise has been a broken promise. The biggest waste in football: me. I like that word, waste. Not only because of how it sounds, but because I am obsessed with wasting my life. I enjoy this stigma. I don’t take drugs, like They try to prove it. I don’t like crime, but, of course, I could have done it. I don’t like going to clubs, I always go to the same place in my neighborhood, Naná’s kiosk,” he says.
He explains how he got hooked on alcohol as a child: “I was 14 years old and in our community we were all partying. There were a lot of people, samba, people coming and going. At that time, I wasn’t a drinker. But when I saw all the kids doing his thing, laughing, I said ‘aaaahhhh’. I took a plastic cup and filled it with beer. That bitter, fine foam that ran down my throat for the first time had a special taste. A new world of ‘fun’ opened up before me. “My mother was at the party and saw the scene. She stayed silent.”
And his father? His father did not allow it. “Stop right now!” he yelled at me. “My aunts and my mother tried to calm things down before the situation got worse. ‘Come on, Mirinho, he’s with his friends, he’s not going to do anything crazy. He’s just there laughing, having fun, leave him alone, Adriano is growing up,'” my mother said. But there was no conversation. The old man went crazy. He snatched the cup from my hand and threw it into the ditch. ‘I didn’t teach you that, son,’ he said, revealing that his paternal grandfather had died. consequence of alcoholism.
The death of his father marked him forever.
His father, four years earlier, was shot in the head. “It was at a party in Cruzeiro. A stray bullet entered through his forehead and lodged in the back of his head. The doctors had no way to remove it. After that, my family’s life was never the same, my father started having frequent seizures. Have you ever seen a person having an epileptic seizure? You don’t want to see it, brother. In 2004 he died. “That changed my life forever. It’s a problem I still haven’t been able to solve.”
His arrival in European football did not make him improve emotionally. “I felt like shit.” For Christmas, he went to Clarence Seedorf’s house and called his mother on the phone: “‘My son! I miss you. Merry Christmas. Everyone is here, the only one missing is you,’ he replied. I started crying immediately. I was devastated. I grabbed a bottle of vodka. I drank all that shit alone. I cried all night. I passed out on the couch because I drank too much. I was in Milan for a reason. become a soccer player in Europe. But that didn’t stop me from being sad,” he laments.
An escape and constant relapses
Neither Roberto Mancini nor José Mourinho nor president Massimo Moratti managed to put it on track. He had just escaped to his neighborhood for a few days: “I couldn’t do what they asked me to do. I stayed well for a few weeks, I avoided alcohol, I trained like a horse, but there was always a relapse. Again and again. Everyone He criticized me, I couldn’t take it anymore. People said a lot of stupid things. ‘Wow, Adriano stopped earning seven million euros. Did he give up everything for this shit?’ That’s what I heard the most. I did it because I wasn’t feeling well. I needed my space to do what I wanted to do.”
Now, with alcohol, nothing seems to have changed. “I drink every other day, yes. And the other days too. How does a person like me get to the point of drinking almost every day? I don’t like to give explanations to others, but here’s one: I drink because it’s not easy to be a promise that remains in debt”.
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Finally, he referred to Villa Cruzeiro, his favela: “It is a very dangerous place. Life is hard. People suffer. If I stopped to count all the people I know who have died violently, we would be here talking for days and days. Here I walk barefoot and without a shirt, only in shorts. I play dominoes, I sit on the sidewalk, I remember my childhood stories, I listen to music, I dance with my friends and I sleep on the floor. of these alleys.” “What more do I want? I don’t even bring women here, much less mess with girls who are from my community, because I just want to be at peace and remember my essence. That’s why I keep coming back here. They respect me here.”
