Pvt. Sands grew up in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, where the football pitch was the place you went when everything else was difficult. He was a natural athlete with a work rate that nobody on his block could match, and from the age of nine he had one goal: professional football.
He trained obsessively. He sacrificed everything he could think to sacrifice. He turned down schooling because it interfered with training. He pushed through injuries that needed rest. He isolated himself from the community around him because connection felt like a distraction from the goal.
The rejections from professional clubs came one after another. He was good. He was not elite. And the difference between good and elite, he eventually understood, had as much to do with the resources he had never had access to as it did with the talent he had been working with.
His final trial ended early. He sat in the stands with a preventable injury and watched. On the way home he passed a boy from his street trying to play with a ball that had almost no air left in it. Pvt. Sands gave him the last money in his pocket to buy a new one, and he sat on his doorstep afterwards for a long time, understanding that the clearest feeling he had had in months was that one.
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