“Do you think Cristiano is good? Wait to see Fabio Paim.”
If you’re going to listen to anyone for an insight into Portuguese footballing talent, Sporting Lisbon scout Aurelio Pereira is about as good as it gets.
Cristiano Ronaldo is the obvious place to start, but Pereira also discovered the likes of Ricardo Quaresma and Joao Moutinho. Those three players alone possess over 400 international caps between them, yet none have excited Pereira quite as much as Fabio Paim.
Hardly known as the most modest of people, even Ronaldo himself regarded Paim, a childhood friend, as the better player. Paim was the talent of a generation and destined for greatness.
But there was little fanfare when Paim joined Chelsea, and even less attention was paid when he departed Stamford Bridge having failed to make a single first-team appearance for the club.
Paim’s agent Jorge Mendes brokered the loan deal from Sporting Lisbon to Chelsea in August 2008, despite the attacking midfielder having spent the previous season on loan at Pacos de Ferreira, who only avoided relegation from the Portuguese top flight thanks to Boavista’s involvement in a bribery scandal.
Still only 20, the potential and promise that Paim had always teased remained evident as he featured for the Blues’ reserves under the tutelage of Brendan Rodgers, but the move proved to be the death knell of his career.
“It was there where I stopped training and doing my work,” he told Globoesporte in 2017. “I started drinking. I had money and I started doing a lot of things I didn’t do before. The doors were open for me to do what I felt like.”
He also brought in Fabio Paim on loan, whom Cristiano Ronaldo once claimed was better than him. He’s now playing for *checks Wikipedia* Leixoes SC’s B team after spells in Angola, Lithuania and Luxembourg.
— Tom Coast (@thcoast) June 15, 2018
In truth, Paim had started going off the rails long before his move to west London.
He had first started attracting attention as a child growing up in Estoril, joining Sporting Lisbon at the age of just six. By the age of 14, Real Madrid, Barcelona and Manchester United were regularly tracking his progress, and the French Football Federation were reported to have made an offer to his family to move to France so he could subsequently represent the country at international level.
Such was the interest in the 16-year-old Paim, Sporting, desperate not to lose the most prodigiously talented teenager in Europe for free,…
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