Keirrison interview: I spent years trying to get my head around what happened at Barca

“Things are not always marvellous: that’s the reality of it. We don’t live in a magical world.”

Keirrison de Souza Carneiro takes a beat to gather his thoughts. He has spent the last hour talking about his career — a confounding, twisty thing that has made him the subject of ridicule in some of the more cruel quarters of the internet — and has just entered existential mode.

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“Life is not all laughs and victories,” he says. His voice carries the quiet conviction of someone who has learnt that lesson the hard way.

If you have heard of Keirrison at all, it is most likely as a kind of punchline, the answer to a mean-spirited quiz question. Name the Brazilian striker who moved to Barcelona at 20, never played a single minute for them and has barely been heard of since. Yep, that’s him.

His name regularly appears on rankings of the worst transfers ever, or lists of wonderkids that weren’t. It is the sort of infamy that usually discourages footballers from opening up. Understandably so.

Keirrison, though, has a lot to say. He wants to flesh out the tale, add the context that most people miss. His story is not just one of curdled potential, of failure divorced from cause or consequence.

He did not just disappear overnight. There were causal factors: injuries, rushed decisions, things he’d do differently now if he had his time again. Feelings, too: anguish, sure, but also pride, hope and — yes — joy.

“I spent years trying to understand my journey, trying to get my head around everything that happened,” Keirrison says. “I went through moments of hardship so that I could grow as a man. Today, I am able to share those experiences.”

To fully comprehend Keirrison’s story — to see the texture beyond the cheap gags — you first have to understand just how good he was.

Often, young Brazilian forwards catch the eye with tricks or creativity. Keirrison was a little different, a cold-blooded marksman who rarely took an extraneous touch. Although not a pure No 9 — he was too slight to lead the line — he racked up up ludicrous numbers of goals at youth level.

“Growing up, Romario was my reference point,” Keirrison says. “He made finishing look so easy. I watched him all the time, making mental notes of the kinds of shots he took. I copied his technique until I had that same kind of simplicity when it came to finishing.”

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He made his senior debut for Coritiba at 17, scoring in his first three matches. A serious knee injury slowed his progress, but only briefly: his goals helped Coritiba secure promotion to the top flight in 2007 and he was even better the following year, ending the Campeonato Brasileiro as joint top scorer and netting 41 times in all competitions. That earnt him a move to Palmeiras, where he continued in the same vein.

The variety of his goals was extraordinary. There were plenty of tap-ins — he was in the right spot so often that you wondered whether he had been given a copy of the ball’s itinerary in advance — but also towering headers, long-range screamers, subtle little glancing flicks into the net.

“Keirrison,” ran one headline at the time, “scores goals to suit all tastes.”

Naturally, the hype machine clunked into gear. There was talk of a Brazil call-up. His name, a mash-up of Keith Richards and Jim Morrison (yes, really!), started to be linked with European clubs.

“I had an offer from Liverpool, contact from Ajax,” he recalls. “But I didn’t think much about it. If you asked me what was going through my head, it was just the next match, the next training session, the next chance improve my finishing. That’s all I wanted.”

Keirrison wasn’t one of those young players for whom global stardom was always on the cards. He did not come through at one of Brazil’s big clubs, didn’t have a massive PR machine behind him. He was a small-town kid who suddenly — unexpectedly — found himself on the brink of something big.

“Already, in Brazil, I was living something much bigger than my wildest dreams,” he says. “God was giving me more than I ever imagined. It was extraordinary to me.”

When it became clear Barcelona were in for him, he was happy — “Who wouldn’t be?” — but did not grasp the enormity of what was about to happen to him.

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“I didn’t have any idea what it actually meant,” he says. “I was this boy from the countryside. For me, Curitiba was already a big city, much bigger than I was used to. Three or four years earlier, I had never even heard of England. I had no idea where Spain was. To me it was all just somewhere out there in the big, wide world.”

Barcelona paid an initial €14million (£12m, $15.7m) for Keirrison, with the potential for a further €2million in add-ons. The striker signed a five-year contract and said it was a dream come true.

“A guarantee of goals,” was the verdict on the Barcelona website, but Keirrison’s new manager did not sound quite as excited. “He’s very young,” said Pep Guardiola. “He has some great statistics. It’s difficult to find a goalscorer. The club has decided to sign him.”

If that now reads like a bad omen, there was no dampening the excitement Keirrison felt in his first days in Catalunya.

“I couldn’t believe what was happening,” he says with a smile. “I had played as (Lionel) Messi, (Andres) Iniesta and Xavi in video games. Now I was there training with them — players who were famous around the world — and being managed by Guardiola. I couldn’t quite get my head around it.

“I remember Zlatan Ibrahimovic arriving at the team hotel for the first time after signing. I said hello and he knew who I was! Incredible. I just stood there thinking, ‘Man, what on earth is going on?’ It was so strange.

“It took a few days for the penny to drop. When it did, I thought, ‘Wow, what a thing! Look where you are, what you have achieved.’ I was thrilled to experience it all.”

There was one issue: due to Spanish league regulations, Barcelona could only register three non-EU players. Yaya Toure was already there and two others — Maxwell and Dmytro Chyhrynskyi — also joined that summer. (Messi and three other squad members did not count towards the quota because they also had European passports.) Keirrison ended up being the odd one out; Barcelona told him he would have to head out on loan.

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Was that the plan when he signed? “No, no,” he says. “I didn’t know I was going to be loaned out. My plan was the same as it had been at Coritiba and Palmeiras before: to play and to stay at the club. Maybe not to be a starter right away, but to stay and earn an opportunity.

“But then there was that registration situation. I don’t know if my old agents knew. They were responsible for the documentation.”

This is the juncture at which the tone of Keirrison’s story begins to shift. The fairytale becomes something altogether more knotty — a parable about the perils facing young footballers. Nothing overly dramatic, but the gradual accretion of bad decisions, bad advice, bad luck, water slowly coming into the boat.

It was not that he would have turned Barcelona down had he known he would be loaned out. “I think it was the right decision to go there,” he says. “When I was at Palmeiras, it felt like a huge victory that Barcelona wanted to sign me. And I don’t know if they would have signed me at a later date. I felt at that moment that I had a huge opportunity.”

Had he been aware, though, he might have been minded to remain at Palmeiras in the short term. “I really like the way they are doing it now, letting players stay in Brazil even after signing them,” he says. “Look at Vitor Roque (who has signed for Barcelona but will remain at Athletico Paranaense until 2024). I think this idea is sensational. If you ask me today, I would like to have stayed longer.”

If Keirrison’s first loan spell in Europe had gone well, the Barcelona registration situation would now be a footnote. It seemed innocuous enough at the time. Because of what happened next, though, Keirrison now sees it as a sign of what was to come.

After he agreed to go out on loan, Barcelona presented him with two options: Portuguese giants Benfica and Real Zaragoza, a smaller club in the Spanish top flight.

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“I asked my agents what they thought,” Keirrison says. “I knew they knew a lot about different clubs so I asked them what the best solution would be. I didn’t know any clubs outside Brazil but I wanted to play. That was my only requirement.

“Benfica ended up being the decision. If you ask me whether I made that decision… well, no. I still didn’t know how things worked at that stage. Benfica for a year: that was the decision. So I went.”

It proved to be a major misstep. Keirrison found the net in a pre-season friendly against Celtic but barely played after that. The squad was already overflowing with strikers: Keirrison was, at best, eighth in the queue, after Oscar Cardozo, Javier Saviola, Nuno Gomes, Weldon, Alan Kardec and Eder Luis. He was sent back to Barcelona six months early, having failed to score in a competitive game.

“It’s not that I wasn’t willing to fight for my place,” he says. “But when there are so many strikers in the squad, it’s going to be complicated, no matter how talented you are.

“Being there made me reflect a bit about my decision-making. I realised that I needed to start getting to grips with my career off the pitch. It wasn’t enough to only focus on my game.”

Keirrison now sees the move to Benfica as a sliding-doors moment. He believes he was poorly advised — that his agents should have encouraged him to choose Zaragoza, where he would likely have played far more.

“This is something I have reflected on a lot,” he says. “It should have been managed better, with more care taken about which club I went to. I think the least the agents could do is know how many strikers were at the club. I didn’t know about those things but they should have known.

“I carry some of the blame because this was my career. I was also responsible. Today, young players are a bit more informed; I didn’t have a clue about anything. That’s not an excuse, just the reality.”

Keirrison’s next loan move, to Fiorentina, was the result of a more careful choice. The coach, Cesare Prandelli, made it clear he wanted him; Alberto Gilardino was the only senior striker in the squad.

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“I thought, ‘OK, that’s good. There’s competition but we’ll both get some game time,'” he says. “It was the first decision I made that was a bit more strategic.”

Keirrison still struggled for starts — only two in five months — but he scored an injury-time equaliser against Lazio and followed it up with the opening goal against Inter a few weeks later.

Those were his first goals in Europe. They were also his only goals in Europe.

Keirrison returned to Barcelona in summer 2010. When he left again, it was back to Brazil. The idea was to restore some of the momentum that had drained from his career, but also just to boost his morale. It had been a testing year in Europe on a personal level as well as a professional one.

“I went there alone,” he says. “I spent a lot of time on my own because my parents weren’t able to go with me and I was single. It was tough, to be honest. When young players ask me for advice today I tell them to go with their parents, or their partner if they have one. Alone, it’s so difficult.

“My agents came to visit me, but they had other commitments. I didn’t have anyone. I tried to make friends but it wasn’t easy. My life became very solitary during that time. I looked forward to games because it was better than just being at the house.”

Initially, Keirrison did reasonably well back in Brazil. He chipped in with a few goals at Santos and showed flashes of the old star power after moving to Cruzeiro in August 2011. But then everything unravelled.

Keirrison ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament. Just when he was on the verge of returning to action — by this stage back at Coritiba, although still on loan from Barcelona — he ruptured it again. The injuries kept him out of action for 21 months.

It was, understandably, a period of enormous suffering.

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“There was a mistake during my first surgery,” says Keirrison. “It wasn’t done correctly — nobody knew about that. The error meant I had to have another operation.

“They were two long periods of recovery, and when I did return to the pitch, I did not feel the same. I spent a few months battling that feeling because I had expected to be the same player I was before. I could not produce the football I saw in my head. I couldn’t do it and I felt revolted.”

He never did manage to get back to where he was before. He was willing to play through chronic pain — with the help of painkillers at first, then acupuncture and massage — but his body could not keep up with his sharp mind.

Since his Barcelona contract ended in 2014, he has had two further spells at Coritiba and two at second-division Londrina, as well as a fleeting stay at Arouca in Portugal. In nine years, he has started 33 matches and scored 12 goals.

Now 34, Keirrison has not played professional football since 2018. Despite that, he does not yet regard himself as a former footballer. He has not retired. Not officially, anyway.

“I still don’t know what is next,” he says. “But I know it’s time to make a decision soon. I am just waiting on God to understand what he wants from me in the future.”

Keirrison would be forgiven for being resentful about how his career has gone. Yet while there is a note of mild frustration in some of his answers, the overwhelming impression is one of contentment. Gratitude, even.

In a funny way, the wide-eyed innocence that worked against him at the start of his European journey was also his saviour. By his own admission, Keirrison had already achieved things beyond his wildest fantasies before even moving to Barcelona.

He grew up in Mato Grosso do Sul, a footballing backwater. Just joining Coritiba as a youngster was surreal to him; he lived at the stadium and looked up to the senior players with awe that bordered on the religious. When he turned professional, it felt like the high point of his entire life.

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“I was an outsider but I became one of them,” he says. “Those years were spectacular for me. I remember scoring in the last game of the Serie B season in 2007, which won us the title. I never experienced that kind of emotion again. It felt huge.

“I can honestly say that I had gone beyond my expectations at 18 or 19 years old. If I had stopped at that stage, I would already have thought my career had been extraordinary.”

Perspective is key. Keirrison tragically lost his two-year-old son in 2015; the ups and downs of a football career do not seem so visceral when placed in their proper context.

“Overall, I’m grateful for what I have experienced,” says Keirrison. “I played in the Champions League. Imagine, a kid from Mato Grosso do Sul! Even with the difficulties, with the things that didn’t go my way, there is no way not to be grateful for that.

“People still stop me in the street, tell me what my goals meant to them. That’s all I wanted from football: to create those feelings, moments that leave a mark in people’s hearts. I created memories for those people. That was my mission.”

Today, Keirrison juggles a few business interests and says he might return to football in a different capacity in the years ahead. He looks healthy and happy.

Still, a question lurks in the background. Doesn’t he ever wonder what might have been? How his life might look today had things fallen into place?

“I have thought about it,” he says. “We can never know how things would have turned out if we had made different decisions, but your mind goes there, of course it does. ‘What if I’d gone to Zaragoza, slotted in, scored a few goals, done enough for Barcelona to bring me back?’ You start to create a story, a version of what could have been.

“I would have liked things to go differently for me in Europe. I would have liked to stay longer. But it’s gone now.”

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As for those lists of the worst signings, Keirrison says he pays no attention.

“I can’t control that,” he says, “I don’t compare myself to others. This is my story. I have to understand it, accept what I went through and move forward. And maybe my experiences will help other people.”

(Top photo: Getty Images)

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