22 September: Thiago Silva, the centre-back they had given up on
Thiago Silva
«O Monstro»
- Fluminense Football Club 1998-2000
- Barcelona Esporte Clube 2000-2001
- Fluminense Football Club 2001
- Pedrabranca Futebol Clube 2002-2003 · 2 goals
- Esporte Clube Juventude 2003-2004 · 3 goals
- Fútbol Club Oporto 2004-2005
- F.C. Porto B 2004-2005 · 5 goals
- FC Dinamo Moscú 2005
- Fluminense Football Club 2006-2008 · 6 goals
- A.C. Milan 2009-2012 · 5 goals
- Paris Saint-Germain FC 2012-2020 · 9 goals
- Chelsea Football Club 2020-2024 · 8 goals
Moscow, 2005
He was twenty and had just left Brazil. Porto loaned him to Dynamo Moscow, and there he started to feel ill: a cough that would not go away, fever, exhaustion. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis, already at an advanced stage: he had been carrying it for half a year without knowing.
He spent around six months in hospital in Moscow. The doctors even considered removing part of a lung. He has said he was told that, had he waited two more weeks to see a doctor, he could have died.
He never played a single game in Russia. He went back to Brazil with no club, no match fitness and twenty-one years of age.
The rebuild
Fluminense took him in in 2006, and within three seasons he was an international-class centre-back again: he reached the 2008 Copa Libertadores final and earned a move to Milan.
In Italy he partnered Alessandro Nesta, which is to say he learned from one of the three or four best centre-backs there have ever been. He won the 2011 scudetto, Milan's last for more than a decade.
Eight years with the armband
In 2012 he joined Paris Saint-Germain and was the captain of the project for eight seasons. He won seven French titles and a handful of cups, and lost the 2020 Champions League final to Bayern, which was his last game for the club.
For Brazil he passed a hundred caps and wore the armband at two World Cups. He won the 2019 Copa América at home, and got the bad side of 2014: he was suspended for the semi-final against Germany, the 7-1 in Belo Horizonte, and had to watch it from the stands.
And then, at 36, he won the Champions League
He left PSG on a free in 2020, aged thirty-five, and Chelsea signed him. Almost everyone read it as a stop-gap signing for one year.
He stayed four seasons, was a fixture in the side and in May 2021 won the Champions League against Manchester City. He was thirty-six, the oldest outfield player to win it in a very long time. Sixteen years after doctors in Moscow had considered taking out a lung.
In 2024 he went home, to Fluminense, the club that took him in when nobody wanted him.
Also born on 22 September
Emmanuel Petit, the third goal of 1998
The holding midfielder of the France side that won the 1998 World Cup and Euro 2000, with his blond hair tied back and a way of playing that was the opposite of his look: disciplined, hard and without frills.
In the 1998 final against Brazil, with the game already won, he was the one who made it 3-0 in the last minute from a Vieira pass. That same year he had won the Premier League and FA Cup double with Wenger's Arsenal.
He is also one of the French players who has spoken most openly about the death of his brother on a football pitch when he was a teenager, and how it shaped his whole career.
- A.S. Monaco F.C. 1988-1997 · 4 goals
- Arsenal Fútbol Club 1997-2000 · 9 goals
- Fútbol Club Barcelona 2000-2001 · 1 goals
- Chelsea Football Club 2001-2004 · 2 goals
Harry Kewell, the best Australian
An Australian winger for Leeds and Liverpool, voted in his country the best Australian footballer of the previous fifty years.
He was part of the Istanbul Liverpool, the 2005 Champions League final against Milan: 3-0 down at half-time and three goals in six minutes. Kewell started and had to go off injured after half an hour, so he watched the greatest comeback in the competition's history from the bench.
He led Australia to their first modern World Cups, in 2006 and 2010.
- Leeds United Association Football Club 1996-2003 · 45 goals
- Liverpool Fútbol Club 2003-2008 · 12 goals
- Galatasaray Spor Kulübü 2008-2011 · 22 goals
- Melbourne Victory Football Club 2011-2012 · 8 goals
- Melbourne City Football Club 2013-2014 · 2 goals
- Al-Gharafa 2013 · 1 goals
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