He enjoyed playing football barefoot, idolising Zico and Diego Maradona.įriends recall how he was always the most skilful, controlling the ball like it was stuck to his feet and striking with surprising power for such a skinny child. Rivaldo's teachers describe a timid boy, nervous to read aloud, but better behaved than his two older brothers. On match days, he would set up outside Estadio do Arruda, home of his beloved Santa Cruz. The middle child of five, Rivaldo Vitor Borba Ferreira grew up on the outskirts of Recife in a favela where tourists never strayed and dreamers deemed delusional.Īs a young boy he would help his parents work at weekends by weeding gardens and roaming the city's most popular beaches, selling chewing gum and ice lollies.

'You work all day to have very little, to go hungry, to suffer. 'You have to live in poverty to know what poverty is,' Rivaldo told Argentine football magazine El Grafico in 1999. Unless your upbringing does not allow it. A year later he added a Champions League title with AC Milan.ĭream big, they say. Within a decade of that interview, he had won the Ballon d'Or, been named Fifa's World Player of the Year and scored for Barcelona what many consider to be the greatest hat-trick of all-time.īy 2002, he had lifted the World Cup as an integral part of Brazil's fearsome frontline - Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Rivaldo. He can now look back on a career that not only vastly exceeded his own expectations, but disproved the widely-held belief that we must dream big to achieve great success. Rivaldo, who turns 50 in April, achieved much, much more.

I hope to achieve more and become an idol for the club's fans.' The modest young man replied between sips on a fresh coconut: 'My dream is already being realised to play for Santa Cruz. As a result, a TV reporter had sought him out, keen to discuss his career ambitions. He had recently made headlines having looped in a perfect, neck-straining header on debut for local side Santa Cruz. His cheeks appeared sunken, the result of having lost most of his teeth to chronic malnutrition in his early teens.

Rivalo wetten