The Lad Can Play: Vitor Flora

Given the high percentage of foreign players coming into the English game each season, it is to be expected that a fair share of them arrive as unknowns. What usually happens is that once attention about a player is heightened by the knowledge that he is going to move to England, information about his abilities (or lack of) starts trickling through.

For Vitor Flora, however, unknown really meant unknown. Whichever way you looked and whoever you asked, no one had heard of him before the announcement that he had joined Liverpool. The only two things known about him were that he was Brazilian and that he played as a striker and that information had been gleaned off the press release that informed the world of the move.

“I'm afraid he's a total unknown even in São Paulo and there's nothing on him,” Jon Cotterill said when A Liverpool Thing got in touch with him. A football commentator for TV Globo in São Paulo and the author of the blog on Brazilian football Pitaco do Gringo, Jon is something of an expert on futebol so that someone like him hadn’t even heard of Flora is quite something.

“I've seen some sites where Brazilians were talking about him and they are just as surprised as anyone by the move.”

There was, however, a good reason for this surprise for Liverpool hadn’t got to know about Flora through conventional means but rather off the internet, more specifically Youtube.

Apparently, it was whilst watching a video of the most promising players in the previous year’s Paulista U17 championship that one of Liverpool’s scouts in South America got to know about him. That initial interest was followed up and eventually it was decided that he was good enough for Liverpool.

Despite being just eighteen, Flora already has quite a story. Hailing from São Joaquim da Barra, a 44,000 large town in the suburbs of Sao Paolo, he made his first steps in football with the legendary side Santos. It didn’t last long, however, as the player barely into his teens couldn’t adapt to being so far away from his family.

From Santos he moved on to Botafogo Ribeirão Preto, where he started to make something of a name for himself. At this point, it is important to point out that this isn’t the legendary Brazilian side hailing from Rio de Janeiro but rather a much smaller one hailing from the city of Ribeirao Preto .

Playing in the U17 championship, Flora scored ten goals which prompted his enterprising father to make a video compilation of his son’s best moments and send it out to the top sides in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul.

This caught the attention not only of Gremio but also of Italian giants Juventus who took Flora on for a trial that lasted forty five days. Ultimately, however, no agreement was reached partly because Juventus wanted to send him out on loan to a Serie B side but largely because they weren’t willing to pay as much as Flora’s father, and agent, was asking for.

Back in Brazil, other clubs were evaluating making a move for Flora with Santos and Cruzeiro interested but these whilst they thought about the deal, Liverpool stepped in to make Flora one of the more unlikely transfers in the club’s history.

It is an interesting bet and not without precedents even though in reality it is much more similar to the plot of the football-themed movie series Goal than the transfer that took Denilson to Arsenal. For, although Denilson too hadn’t played any senior football back in Brazil he already had a good reputation. No one knew anything about Flora making the transfer all the more intriguing. As Jon Cotterill told A Liverpool Thing, “it still sounds a bit odd to me as no one seems to have taken any notice of him here in Brazil.”

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