“Well,” Real Madrid manager Carlo Ancelotti said, “he’s got b—s.”
It was September. Endrick Felipe Moreira de Sousa had recently turned 18, not long after leaving home and crossing the Atlantic to a new world.
He had only been on the pitch 11 minutes on this, his first UEFA Champions League night for the most demanding club of them all, in a place that has sunk many tougher men, and that was as much as he had been on the pitch in total until then. When he got the ball, he had 80 metres to run and 80,000 people watching him, time to think and to fear.
On either side of him, teammates were shouting for the ball. They were entitled to it, and they were better placed than he was, had bigger names than him, and were the best players in the world. To the right, Vinícius Júnior. To the left, Kylian Mbappé, for goodness’ sake.
And he didn’t care about any of it. From 20 yards, he thumped the shot into the net instead, because, well: why not?
How about because if it hadn’t gone in, Thibaut Courtois said afterward, they would have “killed him?” “If he hadn’t scored, he would have had problems,” Antonio Rüdiger laughed.
And frankly, from there, not scoring looked the most likely outcome. “The best solution was to take advantage of the three-on-one,” Ancelotti said, just a small hint of reproach in his analysis. “But he was convinced. He went for the most complicated solution, but it came off very well. He had the courage to shoot.”
And then, smiling, laughing a little too, Ancelotti added: “These last few days, he has proven that he is very brave, in every sense.” Two days earlier, Endrick — a teenager still — had got married.
Oh, he’s brave alright, and this wasn’t the wildest shot he’s ever taken on. In the final of the Paulista Under-17 tournament, he once scored from the halfway line. He got his first Brazil goal at Wembley, of all places. And he wasn’t even a Madrid player yet when he first scored at the Santiago Bernabéu — against Spain.
He was 17. When he was just 16, he had told MARCA: “Every time I take to the pitch, I have no fear. For me, it doesn’t matter if they have 40-year-old players, if they have 31-year-old players.”
“He never shows any insecurity; when he goes on, Endrick never hides,” says João Paulo Sampaio, the head of the Palmeiras academy where it all began. Sampaio first saw Endrick when he was 10 when he was sent a video on his phone. One of the many he gets every day, he didn’t need to watch it for long to know.
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There are two stories Endrick tells that speak to a sense of destiny and assuredness. When he was very small, he would introduce himself as “Endrick Felipe Moreira de Sousa, striker.” And that one day, he sat on the sofa and told his struggling parents not to worry. His father Douglas was a cleaner at the Mane Garrincha stadium in the country’s capital of Brasilia. They didn’t have much money and couldn’t always eat, but it was fine: he was going to be a footballer. Where his dad had tried, and not made it, he would.
The country’s biggest clubs had been watching him since he was eight, with such responsibility this early. There is something very old about this kid. When he joined Palmeiras at age 10 and formally registered at 11, he effectively fulfilled that promise to his parents already. The family was given jobs and an allowance as part of the deal. He joined the U17s at 14 because post-pandemic, his own age group had not returned yet, and the last thing they wanted was for him to stop. Which he didn’t.
Two Brazilian Serie A titles. A national team call-up. A debut goal for Madrid, having only come on in the 86th minute against Real Valladolid. And now here he was, one game into his Champions League career for them and he had already scored, and like that. “Endrick is mad,” Rodrygo said. “He did something no one would do.”
Mbappé? Vinícius? Endrick Felipe Moreira de Sousa, striker — even if teammates had taken to calling him “Bobby” after the bizarre claim that when he was growing up, Bobby Charlton was his idol. It mostly made everyone else laugh, and got him a nickname he probably hadn’t planned.
“Bien Bobbyyyyyy,” Courtois posted on social media. Midfielder Jude Bellingham added: “Bobbiiigol.” “He’s Bobby now,” Rodrygo said, “and if he gets angry it’ll just make it worse.”
Initially, Endrick claimed, he was going to be named after Alfredo Di Stefano. He was less keen to be likened to Pelé, but then perhaps that’s the inevitable toll every emerging Brazilian player pays. Either way, there is no doubt that Endrick is a talent. There is a reason that Madrid paid €60 million for him.
“He has all the qualities to be the best player in the world,” said the former Madrid and Brazil coach Vanderlei Luxemburgo. “Speed, skill, he can shoot with both feet, he can head it, he has it all.”
“He can do things others don’t think of,” Ancelotti said. “He has this gift, he’s very effective.”
“My mother and my sister say that I’m cold. People say I have a heart of ice and I’m very cold with the decisions I make and what I say,” Endrick said, an idea that finds reflection in the words of Thiago Freitas, the agent who has guided his career.
“Raúl was born ready,” says Jorge Valdano, the coach who gave him his debut — and after whom Raúl would name his son. “He was put inside the monster at 17 and he was never afraid of it.”
Valdano admits that he was not sure about playing someone so young, but that one day, Raúl said: “If you want to win, put me in. If not, choose someone else.”
On his debut, as it turned out, Raúl missed sitter after sitter. As he boarded the bus back from Zaragoza, Valdano thought he would encounter a kid who was sunk, but the opposite was true. “Some players are veterans when they’re kids,” he says.
“It was simple, really,” says Valdano’s assistant coach Ángel Cappa. “I used to put together a list of youth-team players [to train with the first team] and [Raúl] stood out. He scored goals and he had personality. He was a born competitor, he has such will that it transformed him into a better player than his qualities suggested.”
Cappa laughs at how logically, Raúl really wasn’t very good, but that once he was on the pitch, he was the best. All they had to do was put him there. In the next game, he scored in the Madrid derby, and 322 more Real Madrid goals followed. Raúl never left the team again.
Here, things are different. Against Lille, the next game after that goal against Stuttgart, Endrick became the youngest player to start a Champions League game for Madrid, again ahead of Raúl. The start was promising too, his qualities revealed in a bursting run eventually stopped by the goalkeeper. Ultimately though he did not score, Madrid lost and so was the momentum.
Endrick had played zero, four, four, one, one, four, six, 21, and three minutes in his games until then. Since then, he has played zero, zero, zero, and zero. When he posted an Instagram picture of himself sitting on the bench durinn El Clásico, there was something slightly melancholic about it. Not that it is about him, not really, and not only. Since then, the numbers aren’t much better: 0 minutes, 11 and 0 in Europe, 15, 3, 0, 2 and 11 in LaLiga. He didn’t play in Madrid’s Intercontinental Cup triumph this week.
When Raúl broke into the team, the results were immediate and incontestable. “And,” Cappa recalls, “that was a good job because we left Emilio Butragueño on the bench.”
A footballer of rare class and technique, a club legend, Butragueño was the figurehead of La Quinta del Buitre, the most emblematic generation of players the club had in years, a man who fans chanted to be president of the country. He had also been Valdano’s teammate. Leaving him out brought immense pressure. “You can’t feel that pressure,” Cappa says. “And besides sometimes players take that decision from you. But it has to be something very special.”
Raúl was. Endrick still might be; the evidence suggests that he could be. Ancelotti is convinced that he is good enough, a special footballer, but this is not the same. Butragueño was 31 by the time Raul emerged, his goal-scoring return slipping into single figures over the two previous seasons. Vinícius and Mbappé are 24 and 25; they might just be the best two players in the world. Ancelotti is a manager for whom respecting hierarchy is fundamental, and with these players in front of Endrick, who wouldn’t be? It is one thing to take on the shot, ignoring Vinícius and Mbappé, and another to take their place.
Before Endrick arrived in Spain, Sampaio had warned in AS: “It’s quite a lot harder for a kid to play for a team that aspires to win everything and had internationals in his place, but every day he is more mature, stronger, stronger,”
“He will be a more complete player within eight months of playing there. We’re talking about a kid who is a phenomenon, but he is 17. We can’t forget that. When he arrives, he will need minutes, he will need to play.”
Doing so is not easy. One idea Sampaio floated was to play with Castilla — it had successfully been done with Vinícius — while another option might be a loan move, although Endrick has turned that down already. For now, at least. He knew that opportunities would be few and that time is on his side, but this is a new reality for him.
It is also one thing to come on late in a game, given the chance to make the most of the few minutes you have — and that too surely played a part in him taking on that shot against Stuttgart — another to get no minutes at all. For him especially: he is only 18, but when he played against Alavés a week after scoring in the Champions League, it was already Endrick’s 100th game as a professional.
He had been used to playing everything, overcoming every barrier however high. Three months on, he is on 101. He was left out of the Brazil squad, having not scored for his country since a strike against Mexico that followed Wembley and the Bernabéu and made it three goals in three games. At the Copa América, he started just once. A player whose progression had been constant has been put on hold for the first time.
Perhaps it should not be a concern, even here where everything is cranked up and everyone is in a hurry, but it is. And if this initially appeared to be one of those stories when there isn’t a story, and no one knows that better than his coach, as calm a man as there is in football, there is a story now. It has been too long, and too little time. And yet there is time. There is talent too, if there is the temperament to go with it. “I see something special in him,” Ancelotti said after Endrick’s first game. “He’s very quick, very powerful in small spaces, and it’s pretty rare to find a player with those characteristics.”
The Madrid coach believes he is a player with the quality and the strength of personality to play for Madrid; putting him above his other players now is a different matter, though. Players such as Vinícius, Mbappé, Bellingham, Rodrygo, and even Arda Güler. The night Endrick scored against Stuttgart, there was a message in him describing the Brazilian as a footballer who “talks little and works a lot, and I like that.” It didn’t yield minutes, and it didn’t end the questions or doubts.
Asked at the start of December what Endrick needed to play more, Ancelotti replied: “Work. He hasn’t played much because Mbappé is dangerous and others are doing well.” A week later, he conceded: “Maybe Endrick and Arda need more minutes. They bring enthusiasm because they’re young but because of that they have to learn certain things too.” One is respect, status.
“I have no problem with young players; I always played 17, 18-year-olds if I thought it was right for the team,” Ancelotti insisted. In other words, it isn’t right for the team, at least not yet. And the questions might not help. “You talk about Endrick, that I don’t give him minutes and blah blah blah,” Ancelotti said next time he faced the press. “But I have to think that he is young: he had to adapt, he has to learn, he has to improve.”
Endrick “has b—s,” Ancelotti says. He will need patience too.
