Andreas Pereira ends search for belonging in embrace of Fulham and Brazil

As a child, Andreas Pereira would finish his football training and wait for his father to pick him up and take him home. The problem: his father, Marcos, was a senior professional at the same club, Lommel United in northern Belgium, and his own training session would often run late. One by one, Andreas’s friends would get picked up and leave. Slowly the car park would empty. Still he waited on his own. “They forgot about me,” he would think to himself.

The impatience and the impotence. The sensation of time passing, of being forgotten or overtaken, of wondering whether he would ever find home. In many ways these are the themes that would come to define Pereira’s career as an adult: a career that has taken in six clubs across a decade, and yet which feels as if it is only now beginning.

Until this season he had never started more than 34 league games at any one club. Not at Manchester United, where he was signed as a 15-year-old prodigy after Sir Alex Ferguson intervened to get the deal over the line. Not at Granada under the brief and surreal stewardship of Tony Adams, nor at Valencia or Lazio or Flamengo, where he went on loan and was frequently played out of position on the wing. It took a newly promoted club in west London to give this gifted midfielder a direction and a purpose.

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Now 28 and back in the Brazil squad for the first time in six years, this has arguably been his most complete season, even if – with one goal for a solid mid-table team – it’s easy to overlook exactly what he’s doing out there. But he ranks seventh for key passes in the Premier League this season, and the six players above him – Bruno Fernandes, Pascal Gross, Martin Ødegaard, Bukayo Saka, Kieran Trippier and Julián Álvarez – are considered elite creators. Perhaps, with a more reliable source of goals ahead of him, Pereira would be considered among that bracket.

More than this, he has become quietly indispensable to the way Fulham defend under Marco Silva: leading the initial press and then organising the second press. “Of all our midfielders, Andreas is probably the only one who can do that role really well,” Silva said recently. This season, compared with last, he is taking fewer shots but seeing more of the ball, dribbling and tackling more, returning to the predominantly creative role he played in his two seasons on loan at Flamengo.

Were it not for a fateful phone call in the summer of 2022, Flamengo is probably where Pereira would be. He had gone to Brazil in search of a fresh start and was on the verge of building a new life there with his young family. But of course there was a kernel of resentment, having spent eight years trying and failing to establish himself in English football. “I wanted to show people I could play in the Premier League,” he told the latest (excellent) episode of the Fulham Fix podcast. “I didn’t feel I had my top level at United. I wanted to show them: look, you made a big mistake here.”

In truth, what happened at United was not so much a mistake as a litany of unfortunate mishaps. Both Louis van Gaal and José Mourinho rated him highly before being sacked. And it was interesting to hear Ole Gunnar Solskjær last week naming Pereira as one of the players – along with Jesse Lingard and Dan James – around whom he built the hard-running counterattacking team that beat Manchester City three times during the 2019-20 season. But there was constant pressure, internally and externally, for a more possession-dominant approach. Fernandes was signed and quickly made the No 10 position his own. Pereira was loaned to Lazio during the pandemic and never played for United again.

This was the pressure point Silva squeezed when he picked up the phone. The manager told Pereira he had unfinished business in England. That he had not shown the Premier League who he really was. He pointed to the success he had enjoyed with Richarlison at Watford. And it is striking how many of Silva’s signings at Craven Cottage – Pereira, Willian, Bernd Leno, Alex Iwobi, Armando Broja – are players who were once at big clubs but now have a point to prove. Who have slipped to the fringes of the elite and are desperate to claw their way back. Perhaps this is not a sustainable long-term strategy: Fulham currently have the oldest squad in the Premier League. But right now, it is a group with the ideal blend of high standards, experience and impatience.

Even if Pereira’s exploits have largely slipped under the radar this season, at least one man has been taking notice. The new Brazil coach, Dorival Júnior, knows Pereira from Flamengo, visited him at Fulham’s training ground Motspur Park last month and has now recalled him to the squad for the forthcoming friendlies against England and Spain. He may end up playing in a slightly deeper role for Brazil than he does for Fulham: the role for which he was also reportedly – and unsuccessfully – targeted by Steven Gerrard’s Al-Ettifaq in January as a replacement for Jordan Henderson.

It’s easy to see why Pereira was happy to stay put. Perhaps the best way of interpreting this fitful career is as a search for belonging: the midfielder mistaken for a winger, the Brazilian born in Belgium, uprooted to England as a child, dispatched around the world and forced to start afresh every time, forever worrying that he had been forgotten for good. It took a while, but Pereira may finally have found his way home.