by 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 will often run late. One by one, Andreas’ friends would pick them up and drop them off. Slowly the parking lot would be empty. Still he remained alone. “They forgot about me,” he would think to himself.
The impience and the impotence. The feeling of the past, forgotten or forgotten, wondering if he would ever get home. In many ways these are the themes that would come to define Pereira’s career as an adult: a career that has impressed at six clubs over the past decade, and feels like it’s only just getting started.
Until this season he has never started more than 34 league games at one club. Not at Manchester United, where he was signed as a 15-year-old prodigy after Sir Alex Ferguson intervened to seal the deal. Not at Granada under Tony Adams’ surreal brief stewardship, nor at Valencia or Lazio or Flamengo, where he went on loan and was often played out of position on the wing. It took a newly promoted club in west London to give this talented midfielder direction and 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, if only – with one goal for a strong mid-table side. – that it is easy to forget what he is doing. But he ranks seventh for key passes in the Premier League this season, while the six 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 quietly become indispensable to the way of defending Fulham under Marco Silva: in charge of the front press and then the organization of the second press. “Of all our midfielders, Andreas is probably the only one who can do that role very well,” Silva said recently. This season, compared to the last, he is taking fewer shots but seeing more of the ball, dribbling and tackling more, returning to the largely creative role he had in his two seasons on loan at Flamengo.
Had it not been for a fateful phone call in the summer of 2022, Flamengo would probably be where Pereira would be. He went to Brazil in search of a fresh start, and was about to build a new life there with his young family. But of course there was no fear, after spending 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 was at my highest 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 disasters. He was highly regarded by Louis van Gaal and José Mourinho before he was sacked. And it was interesting to hear Ole Gunnar Solskjær last week name Pereira as one of the players – along with Jesse Lingard and Dan James – that he built the hard-hitting counter-attacking team that beat Manchester City three times during the season 2019-20. But there was constant pressure, internally and externally, for a more dominant approach to ownership. 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 pressed when he picked up the phone. Silva told him he had unfinished business in England. He didn’t show the Premier League who he really is. He mentioned the success he had with Richarlison at Watford. And it is remarkable how many signings Silva made at Fulham – Pereira, Willian, Bernd Leno, Alex Iwobi, Armando Broja – players who were once in big clubs but now have a point to prove. Who have slipped to the fringes of the elite and are desperate to find their way back. This may not be a sustainable long-term strategy: Fulham currently have the oldest squad in the Premier League. But at the moment, it is a group that has the ideal combination of quality, experience and impatience.
Even if Pereira’s exploits have largely slipped under the radar this season, at least one man is taking notice. New Brazil coach Dorival Júnior is familiar with Pereira from Flamengo, having visited Fulham’s training ground at Motspur Park last month and has now recalled him to the squad for the upcoming friendlies against England and Spain. He may play a slightly deeper role for Brazil than he does for Fulham: the role that Al-Ettifaq Steven Gerrard was said to – and unsuccessfully – targeted for in January as a replacement for Jordan Henderson.
It’s easy to see why Pereira was happy to stay put. Perhaps the best way to interpret this brilliant career is as a search for family: the midfielder mistaken for a winger, the Brazilian born in Belgium, plucked to England as a child, sent around the world and forced having to start anew each time, it is a constant worry. that he had been forgotten for good. It took a while, but Pereira may have finally found his way home.
