João Pedro, the goal-scoring son of a prisoner who leaped from Rio's beach to the World Cup final.

The night Chelsea played one of the longest matches in history at the Club World Cup, the round of 16 against Benfica, lasting more than four and a half hours due to storms, the striker who led them ten days later to this Sunday's final against PSG was with his friends on the beach in Rio de Janeiro. João Pedro was still a Brighton & Hove Albion player on vacation that day. Although alert. His agents had told him that the English team, which had just advanced to the round of 16 against Benfica on June 28, wanted to sign him for as long as they lasted in the tournament. They paid 64 million euros, and on July 2, they took him off the beach and sent him to the United States. Just in time to make his debut two days later in the quarterfinals against Palmeiras and on the 8th, to win the semifinal against Fluminense, the club that saved him as a kid, with two stunning goals.

“When I was young, I had nothing, and they gave me everything,” he said after knocking them out of the tournament. “They introduced me to the world. If I'm here, it's because they believed in me.” He made his first-team debut at 17, and at 18, they sold him for €20 million to Watford, where he spent four seasons, two of them in the Second Division, until Brighton paid €32 million for him in the summer of 2023. Before the Brazilian club he eliminated put him on the market, things were more complicated.

João Pedro was born in 2001 in Ribeirão Preto, in the interior of the state of São Paulo, and from a young age he was alone with his mother, Flavia, who had separated from her partner. His father, José João de Jesús, also known as Chicão, who also had a brief career as a footballer with Botafogo-SP, ended up in prison. He was sentenced to 16 years, of which he served half, for his participation in the murder of a 17-year-old boy who he felt had disrespected him. The sentence determined that he had ordered the boy's death.

While his father, of whom he knew little, was living in prison, João Pedro began his football journey at the age of 5 in the youth academy of the team where Chicão had played. One of his coaches at the time, Alexandre Ferreira, recalled a few days ago in O Globo that his goal-scoring instinct was already evident: “He was an intelligent kid who always wanted the ball. He was always focused in training. When others were joking around, he always had the ball nearby. And when it came to finishing, which was what he liked most, he already stood out with above-average accuracy.”

But there came a time when everything went wrong. They didn't want him to continue at Botafogo-SP's youth academy, and he spent time at Santos, but they didn't give him the option to stay with them either. Then a high-risk opportunity arose. Fluminense scouts had spotted him at a tournament in Mato Grosso and offered him a place to join the club, but that would require him to move from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro.

His mother decided to take the risk, and the risk quickly backfired. She was fired and left in a very difficult financial situation. “I only had a pair of sports pants and a pair of sneakers,” he recounted in an interview. “My mother only ate eggs and left me the pieces of meat. She always said the important thing was that I ate.” They were on the verge of having to return to São Paulo, but then Fluminense offered to pay Flavia the minimum wage. She was very grateful and rejected several offers until the millionaire from Watford arrived, where she continued her journey to the beach from which Chelsea knocked her out for the quarterfinals.

In Rio, it wasn't all friends and sand. "I have a personal trainer, and I also worked out to stay fit," he said a few days ago. He got this help through Thiago Silva , his opponent in the semifinal as captain of Fluminense. A few years ago, the former Chelsea player called him one day to inquire about him and offer help. He recommended he hire Caio Mello, the physiotherapist he's been seeing for a decade. "Imagine if Chelsea called me and I hadn't been training," João Pedro said.

And it happened. “We brought him in because this season we played against a lot of teams that defended low, and he has a lot of quality in small spaces,” explained Maresca, the English club's manager, after the two goals that took them to the final. “Because he was on vacation, he was a little fresher, which is important.”