Adriano: Still alive and kicking?

Adriano at his best while playing for Internazionale

The Brazilian striker Adriano , ex-Internazionale, still wants to return to play football. Aged 32, he was one of the most feared strikers in the first decade of this century. Adriano is negotiating to sign a contract with Atlético PR, a small team that was the big surprise of Brazilian football in 2013 and that is competing in the Copa Libertadores 2014 -the equivalent of the Champions League of South America.

Nicknamed ‘The Emperor’ by the Italian press, Adriano probably will sign a contract with the club until the end of the season. The agreement presumably will also take into account the productivity of the player, as when he was playing for Corinthians and Flamengo (the last teams of his career), his behaviour was not good; Adriano didn’t have commitment, missed training sessions and didn’t control his weight.

Today, Adriano has gone 710 days without playing football as a professional.

Adriano’s highly distracting lifestyle

It is one of the most fantastic stories of Brazilian football in recent times. A poor boy from the Vila Cruzeiro slum, in Rio de Janeiro, emerging from the Flamengo youth team (Brazil ‘s most popular football club) and exploding in Italian football in the first half of the 2000′s .

Physically powerful, super skilled and unstoppable with his fulminate sprints (despite his powerful physical attributes), Adriano was almost every day in the headlines of the Italian sports newspapers, but his rise to fame also brought the negative aspects of the lifestyle to life as he got carried away by the night life, alcohol, and false friends.

Combined with the death of his father in 2004 (Since 1992, his father had a bullet lodged in his head as he was accidentally shot in an exchange of gunfire between police and criminals in the Vila Cruzeiro slum, at Rio de Janeiro) and his increasingly unprofessional habits, the decline of a player at the pinnacle of his career was inevitable.

The problem looks to be with the people around him who influence him, as his former teammates had only nice things to say about him.

“Adriano has a big heart, he is a friendly guy who hurt only himself, never, never other people” said Léo Moura, the current Flamengo captain.

“When we were playing together for Internazionale, I tried a lot to help him, because you can not imagine how much he is a nice guy, but unfortunately when he looked doing well and coming back to be that decisive player, he declined again with his problems..” said Maicon, current Roma player.

With more professionalism, there is no doubt that Brazil ‘s number 9 for the World Cup would have been Adriano.