One of the most traditional clubs in the interior of Rio de Janeiro, Serrano Football Club, from Petrópolis, has attracted the attention of teams from all over the country for its base categories. The centenary association, which is proud to be the first to register the player Garrincha, ceded the management of football to a partner and, since 2020, has had base training concentrated in Barra da Tijuca. Among the hundreds of boys who seek to be successful in football, the children and grandchildren of idols from some of the main fans in Brazil stand out.
A few days ago, the club announced that it had signed the first professional contract for Adriano Carvalho, son of Adriano Imperador, a striker who defended Flamengo and the Brazilian national team, as well as Inter Milan. The 16-year-old boy, whose name, physiognomy and preferred foot are identical to his father, signed a four-year contract with Serrano even though he has proposals from teams that currently have more visibility.
“I already knew the club, many played with me in other schools. I already knew the work of the technical commission, administration, physiotherapy people”, said the boy. “The structure here is wonderful. Apart from the big ones, I think few clubs in Brazil offer this. Serrano has all the equipment we need.”
In fact, the TC in Barra da Tijuca is modern and concerned with sports science. Every day the athletes respond to a questionnaire that includes data on hours of sleep, level of tiredness and others. Physical evaluations are frequent, and everything is included in the athlete’s history.
The training methodology is also a big attraction, and that’s because it has its DNA coming from Catalonia. Since 2020, Serrano’s football has been managed by Interfut, a football academy that eight years earlier joined Barcelona to bring the Spanish team’s schools to Brazil. The schools were located in Barra da Tijuca, in Rio, and in Barra Funda, in São Paulo.
For Kleber Leite Filho, known as Klebinho, one of those responsible for managing Interfut – and now for football at Serrano -, the location of the schools and Barcelona’s methodology were the first factors responsible for attracting the children of athletes to their pitches. In Rio, CT do Serrano is located in one of the favorite neighborhoods of footballers. In São Paulo, the school was located in the same region as the CTs in Palmeiras and São Paulo.
The agreement with Barcelona ended in 2019. The following year, Interfut partnered with Serrano. At that time, it stopped being a little school and started to invest in grassroots and even professional football. What hasn’t changed is the interest of ball players and former players in seeing their children and grandchildren training at the club. Being in Barra also helps a lot.
“The list is long. We just signed a contract with Adriano, son of Adriano Imperador; Zico’s grandchildren trained with us here too; Carli’s son, from Botafogo; Beto’s son, a former Flamengo player; Zé Roberto… If I were to mention them all, I’m sure I’ll forget someone”, lists Klebinho.
Some of football’s famous fathers and grandfathers are seen watching the boys practice. Adriano, the son, says that he usually sends videos of matches in grassroots competitions to his father, the Emperor. “If he sees that I miss a submission, he’s pissed off. Then he says, ‘you have to do it like this, like this and like that’, and then I go there and do it the way he wants”, he says. “He is my father and a great idol. He brings me so much pride and inspiration.”
SAF’S DREAM
Founded in 1915, Serrano Football Club, from Petrópolis, in the mountainous region of Rio, begins to live a new era. The club that has what would be Garrincha’s first professional record and is proud to have barred Flamengo de Zico’s fourth state championship in 1980, ceded football management, is recovering its assets and should soon become an SAF.
Inaugurated in 1951, the Atílio Marotti stadium is the jewel in the crown of a heritage that also includes a gymnasium, a soccer court and swimming pools, but it barely left the club’s power. Beset by debts that dragged on for decades, the stadium was pledged and even auctioned in 2013 for around R$ 3 million. The scare lasted a week and was reversed, but it was the warning the club needed to save football.
“The club had somewhere between R$5 million and R$6 million in debt. In 2013, there was an auction and Serrano ended up losing the stadium, but we managed to reverse it. We reassessed it, which, at the time, pointed out that it was worth R$ 25 million. The judge, still in the first instance, saw that it was a very big loss for the club. We reversed it, but we saw that there would be no other way (to secure the stadium) but to pay the debts”, recalls Alexandre Beck, China, president of Serrano.
Serrano then launched a project for a real estate development to raise funds. The team took a year off from the championships, but the social part continued to work. The problem is that all revenue from leasing the society court, in addition to 30% of what was achieved with monthly membership fees and even the canteen’s revenues, were pledged. Maintaining a professional team and taking care of the stadium, then, was almost a utopia.
“We needed a partner, and that’s when Interfut came along. Until today, they’ve complied with everything that was agreed in the contract and have proven to be a reliable partner. We intend to continue this partnership for a long time”, says China.
The agreement is in the third year of a contract initially foreseen to last ten years, which may be extended for an equal period. “It’s football management. What we have today with Serrano is pre-SAF. We manage the stadium. They didn’t have a training center, so we do it here (in Barra da Tijuca)”, says Kleber Leite Filho, one of Interfut’s managers and executive responsible for football at Serrano. Klebinho is the son of former Flamengo president Kleber Leite.
The improvements in the stadium are already visible, even more so considering that it is a 72-year-old building that was almost abandoned. “We changed the grass, now it is Greenleaf, which makes the lawns of some of the main stadiums in Brazil. We are making improvements, we have already renovated the electrical part, changing rooms, improved the stands, we are also trying to take care of the lighting to play games at night” , explains Klebinho.
Practically all of the six thousand seats in the stadium were equipped with chairs from the Maracanã – those that were removed from the main stadium in Rio in the renovation carried out with a view to the 2007 Pan American Games. cede football management to Interfut, only 10% of them had been installed.
The natural path, which both China and Klebinho admit, is to transform Serrano into an SAF. “It brings advantages because of legislation, taxation. The model is more functional. It is something that is still being evaluated, studied, but we are in that process”, says Kleber Leite Filho. “The SAF comes to bring investment in football, but of course it has to go through the council, there is still a whole process”, adds Alexandre Beck.
With or without this change, the goal of the two is to see Serrano back in the first division of Rio. Klebinho also plans to take the club to Série D and, later, to C of the Brazilian Championship. The assessment is that this is the best way to make the partnership generate profit for both parties in addition to the sale of player rights. “For now, it’s just an investment”, admits Klebinho.
GARRINCHA
Serrano was the first club to register the player Garrincha – at least, as far as we know. A few years ago, while organizing the storage room and trophy room in the gymnasium, one of the club officials found a framed card. “He looked at me and said: ‘it must be someone important, because they made a comic’. When I looked at the name and the photo, I saw that it was Garrincha!”, recalls Alexandre Beck.
The file is dated April 17, 1951, when Garrincha was 17 years old. It served to confirm that the player was signed up by Serrano to compete in the local championship.
Having Garrincha as one of the names to wear his jersey is, without a doubt, one of Serrano’s greatest prides. Another was the fact that the team managed to block Flamengo de Zico’s fourth state championship in 1980. The red-black team went to Petrópolis that year and needed a simple draw to guarantee the title. It rained a lot that day.
“The field was flooded and our president proposed not to play the game. Márcio Braga (president of Flamengo at the time) looked at him and said ‘no, let’s play, it will be a historic rout’. They lost the game and the title Then they knocked everything down, the crowd went all over the city”, recalls Gilberto Cardoso, 66, who considers himself one of Serrano’s most fervent fans. “There were 20,000 people. It was the biggest game in Serrano’s history. There were people perched even on the floodlight towers, I watched from the hill.”
2023-05-02 21:10:51
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