Forwards overcome discouragement and difficulties to be Brazil’s top scorers

Fluminense-PI football manager Vicente Medeiros still remembers how he found striker Mário Sérgio, Brazil’s top scorer in the season with 16 goals.

In October of last year, the manager had his table crammed with piles of DVDs with the best moments of almost 200 players, resumes sent by managers and reports made by club analysts.

It was strange to Medeiros an insistent lobby by agent Edi Souza for a chance for the player revealed by Bahia and with his best season in his career as a reserve for Botafogo-PB, in 2018, when he scored five goals in 24 matches.

“We analyzed the name with Marcelo Vilar [treinador] and we decided to try. Fluminense lacked an area player, we were looking for someone with that profile. We offer him a pre-contract, a trial period between November and December. Nobody knew for sure what would come,” Medeiros tells sheet.

Vilar, the manager and everyone at the club were impressed with the striker’s eye for goals, hitherto unknown, during pre-season friendlies. In the first two games of Piauiense, four goals.

Super Mario, as he became known by the fans, already has 16 goals in 13 games, an average of 1.23, higher than the names like Hulk and Gabigol, who have six and nine, respectively.

The 26-year-old forward’s journey to the best phase of his career was thorny. Last year, after ten months without a club, he considered quitting football.

“I went to Boa Esporte at the beginning of the year, but it didn’t work out. I got there, and it wasn’t what I expected, I returned home. Everything was well on its way to go to Egypt, but the situation cooled down due to the pandemic. I started to get discouraged”, he explains.

The Bahian from Candeias (33 km from Salvador) recalled, then, the injury he overcame in the basic categories. And he sought strength for yet another turnaround.

In 2013, he went more than a year without playing football due to a patellar dislocation. He came back in 2014 but couldn’t stop limping. “It was even worse there. I saw my friends playing and training and I just cried.” He turned around in a good appearance in the 2015 São Paulo Junior Cup.

Mario has a contract until November and a good advantage over the Colombian Hugo Rodallega, from Bahia, now in second place in the race for the country’s top scorer, with 12 goals, but he sees competitors grow with similar stories of overcoming.

In the Campeonato Paulista, Ronaldo, from Inter de Limeira, leads the artillery in an isolated way with nine goals, but he went through hard difficulties in the last year, in Avaí. He lived with back pay and still had to fight depression.

“I went straight away for four months without receiving it. Then, I felt pubalgia again, an old injury, and I ended up giving myself up. I think the only reason I didn’t sink was because I immediately sought professional help. My mother and wife also helped me a lot. at home wanting to give up, stop”, he says.

Ronaldo dreamed of taking off in Serie A of the Brazilian Championship. In 2020, he was the highlight of Santo André’s surprising campaign until the stoppage of the competition due to the worsening of the Covid-19 pandemic. He was traded with Sport, but soon lost ground with the change of coaches.

At 30 years old, the striker formed by Portuguesa has 14 clubs in his curriculum. In 2013, at Joinville, he scored 11 goals in 36 games. For Ituano, the following year, he scored eight times in 16 matches. He also played in Japan and Malaysia.

“A lot of people ask me why I’m fine now, at 30. I say it’s a combination of spiritual, mental and trust factors. Here, in Limeira, I know they’ll support me, that I’m not going to play a game and get cashed out”, explains the player, who has contact until April 4.

Another competitor is the already experienced Edson Cariús, 33. He has nine goals in 15 matches played by Ferroviário, from Ceará, in 2022 with an even more unlikely route in football.

The striker turned professional in 2008, but left the sport for four years to help his parents with the harvest in Cariús, in the interior of Ceará. In 2012, he was called to work in a motorcycle shop in Iguatu, a neighboring municipality. He earned from R$50 to R$100 to play for the city’s floodplain teams.

He received his first chance at Iguatu Futebol Clube, where he won access from the third to the second division of Ceará. The salary was R$ 600.

“I started at an advanced age for football, at the age of 23. Thank God, I’ve never been more than three months without a club since then. The real number 9 is in extinction, so I think there’s still room for many. of difficulties”, he says.

It was at Barbalha, in 2013, that the striker began to see his career change course. Since then, he played for a series of small clubs until reaching Fortaleza, in 2020, and Remo, in the last year.

Also with nine goals is Renan Gorne, top scorer for Confiança, from Sergipe. Revealed at Botafogo, he never got the space he dreamed of, even with years as a highlight of the club and stints in youth teams. In 2016, he competed with Pedro, now at Flamengo, for artillery in Rio de Janeiro.

“I don’t think much about what happened, but there are things that are almost impossible to understand. I was loaned to a team from the United States, I came back with six goals in 13 games, and they didn’t even want to take me to the pre-season”, he says.

Now 26 years old and having good recent seasons, he hopes to finally attract attention from other clubs. In 2020, while at Confiança, he scored ten goals in 41 games. In 2021, for Remo, there were nine out of 44. Now, the brand is the best in its career.

“Competitiveness is always questioned, but I play on fields in the interior with very difficult situations. It’s all more root, more complicated, and I appreciate that. I recovered the happiness of playing football here and I know that everything will happen naturally”, he says.

Currently, Gorne, Ronaldo and Cariús share third place in the race for the country’s artillery with Gabigol, from Flamengo, Zé Vitor, from Marcílio Dias, Alex Sandro, from Brusque, Rodriguinho, from Cuiabá, and Nicolas, from Goiás.

Check out Brazil’s top scorers in 2022

1. Mário Sérgio (Fluminense-PI)
16 goals, 13 games (1.23 goals per game)

2. Hugo Rodallega (Bahia)
12 goals, 13 games (0.92)

3. Renan Gorne (Trust)
9 goals, 8 games (1.12)

3. Alex Sandro (Brusque)
9 goals, 11 games (0.81)

3. Zé Vitor (Marcílio Dias)
9 goals, 11 games (0.81)

3. Ronaldo (Inter de Limeira)
9 goals, 11 games (0.81)

3. Gabigol (Flamengo)
9 goals, 11 games (0.81)

3. Rodriguinho (Cuiabá)
9 goals, 11 games (0.81)

3. Nicolas (Goiás)
9 goals, 14 games (0.64)

3. Edson Cariús (Railway)
9 goals, 15 games (0.6)