When the name Adriano is mentioned in football discussions, the reaction it elicits often can’t be expressed by a single word, but is better conveyed by a sound.
It’s not uncommon to hear a sympathetic sigh, an acknowledgement of what was, for a brief period of time, and what could’ve been.
Adriano had all the tools to be the greatest striker in the world. A dynamic powerhouse of a player who possessed a left-foot so ferocious it became the stuff of legend in one of the most iconic video game series of all-time.
The man who was raised in Rio De Janeiro’s Vila Cruzeiro favela ultimately ended back where he started, and by choice. Adriano recently posted an article on the Players’ Tribune website explaining the torment he lives, and played through, after pictures of him circulated online.
“Do you know what it feels like to be a promise? I know. Including an unfulfilled promise. Football’s biggest waste: Me. I like that word, waste,” the former Inter Milan striker wrote.
“Not only because of how it sounds, but because I’m obsessed with wasting my life.”
Greek mythology doesn’t apply to Adriano here. From the outside, the mythical tale of Icarus could be used to describe his story: a player who for 18 months was on course to meet his destiny, flew too close to the sun and ultimately burned out.
Yet by his own admission, all of the Brazilian’s issues stemmed from a single event: the death of his father in August 2004. Almir Leite Ribeiro had the biggest and most calming influence on Adriano and stopped him picking up alcohol early in his life.
Adriano recalls picking up a cup of beer at a street party when he was just 14, only for his father to snatch it and pour the contents out. “I didn’t teach you that, son,” his father said. Mere weeks after winning the 2004 Copa America in which Adriano scored seven goals, some of them majestic, finishing as top goalscorer and dedicating the victory to him, he learned of his father’s death via a phone call on a pre-season retreat with Inter.
Aged only 44, Almir died of a heart attack, and it was the watershed moment in Adriano’s life. “My father’s death changed my life forever. To this day, it’s a problem I still haven’t solved,” he wrote.
Javier Zanetti, who was in the room with Adriano when he received the phone call, remembers a scream so visceral he never forgot it.
“I still get the shivers today [thinking of the scream],” the former Inter captain said in an interview in 2017.
“From that day on, Massimo Moratti and I treated him like a younger brother: he continued to play football, to score and dedicate the goals to his father, pointing to the sky. But after that phone call, nothing was the same again.”
Considering his peak lasted less than two years and the descent played out much longer, it can be easy to focus on the ‘wasted’ talent rather than the sheer force of nature Adriano was.
From January 2004, when he moved back to Inter from Parma, to June 2005 he scored a ludicrous 52 goals in all competitions for Inter and Brazil.
To the younger readers who grew up in the statistical landscape of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, 52 goals in 18 months doesn’t seem that overly spectacular, but strikers in that era rarely posted those kind of numbers, in a period where defenders could still defend and the game wasn’t as open.
And Adriano’s catalogue of goals was extraordinary. He could be as deft as he could powerful; use brute force as well as technique. In that 18-month spell, there was no stopping him.
For every piledriver against Parma, Chievo, Atalanta, Udinese and Roma there were mazy dribbles against Perugia, Empoli, Udinese and Werder Bremen.
For every outside of the foot finish against Porto there were set piece marvels with his instep against Ascoli and Roma. His last great strike for Inter, against Chievo in February 2007, was a brilliant curling effort from the edge of the box that zeroed into the opposite corner while running away from goal.
Adriano could score every kind of goal, and was impossible to mark.
“Adriano faced players like (Khakha) Kaladze and (Paolo) Maldini and beat them on his own. To beat Maldini you can’t just be anyone,” former Inter full-back and teammate Maicon recalled recently on a Brazilian podcast.
“Adriano didn’t beat him, he steamrollered him!”
Comparisons with Ronaldo – Il Fenomeno, not the Portuguese one – followed Adriano from his first game in black-and-blue. Only 19 years of age, he made his debut for Inter against Real Madrid in a meaningless pre-season friendly in 2001, and rifled in a howitzer of a free-kick. “When he scored that goal against Real Madrid, I said to myself that we had found the new Ronaldo,” recalled Zanetti.
Both Brazilians were at Inter together for a short window of time but never played together due to injury and Adriano being sent away to gain experience. By the time he returned Ronaldo had long left, joining Madrid in the summer of 2002.
Yet for that year-and-a-half Adriano was Ronaldo 1.0 reincarnated; the closest the game has come to reproducing another Fenomeno.
In the modern game, systemised to the max with homogeneous talents created in youth academies across the world, it’s difficult to see where another striker like Adriano will come from: a complete bulldozer of a player who was perhaps a bit rough around the edges but could also dance a tango with the ball and get fans off their seats with a moment of brilliance.
The great Colombian defender Ivan Cordoba once told Adriano he was a mix of Ronaldo and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, while the Swede himself described Adriano as a ‘pure animal’.
“No one could tackle him or take the ball from him. He could score from any angle,” Ibrahimovic wistfully reminisced in 2020.
“Fifty percent of everything you do is mental. If you don’t have it in your head, it’s tough.”
Mental health within football wasn’t exactly a taboo subject in the 2000s, but there were still primitive attitudes towards the topic despite players like Stan Collymore and Gigi Buffon publicly admitting their battles with depression.
Adriano finished sixth in the 2004 Ballon d’Or ranking, but the goals, the money, the trophies and the acclaim couldn’t fix the ‘hole in his soul’. He could beat any defender put in front of him, but he couldn’t outscore the pain of losing his role model. The abuse he put on his body eventually caught up with him towards the end of 2005 and despite finishing the 2005-06 with 13 goals, he only scored three times for Inter in the lead up to the 2006 World Cup.
He would never hit double figures in Europe again.
“My love for football was never the same,” he said.
“I was across the ocean in Italy, away from my family, and I just couldn’t cope with it. I got so depressed, man. I started drinking a lot. I didn’t really want to train. It had nothing to do with Inter. I just wanted to go home.”
The Brazilian’s career was ostensibly finished by the age of 24. It speaks volumes of the high regard he’s held in that Zanetti, a man who won some 16 trophies for Inter, states the failure to save Adriano’s career as his biggest regret.
Now 42 and his career long since over, Adriano’s still a man in search of a measure of peace. “Here [Vila Cruzeiro] I walk barefoot and shirtless, just wearing shorts. I play dominoes, sit on the curb, remember my childhood stories, listen to music, dance with my friends, and sleep on the floor,” he wrote.
“Because I just want to be at peace and remember my essence. That’s why I keep coming back here. Here I am truly respected.”
Adriano will forever remain one of football’s great ‘what ifs’, a raw, powerful, uncoached street striker who lit up the world for a small period of time, a talent so good he was nicknamed ‘The Emperor’. Yet that’s more than most achieve in a lifetime. Moreover, Brazil hasn’t produced a forward as fearsome as Adriano since.
In fact, it could be argued football no longer produces Adrianos, and is all the poorer for it. He was the last of his kind.
“I see my father in each of these alleys,” he wrote of spending his days in the favela where he was born and raised.
Let’s hope Adriano can find the peace he’s looking for.
