DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS? FORMER FLAMENGO IS THE FIRST NON-BORN IN BRAZIL TO SCORE A GOAL FOR THE BRAZILIAN SELECTION

On the day that the CBF completed 110 years of its foundation, for the first time in history a player born outside Brazil scored a goal for the Seleção. Born in Duffel, Belgium, Andreas Pereira was responsible for the feat, paving the way for the 3-2 victory over Mexico, in a friendly, last Saturday.

Son of Brazilian parents, Andreas was raised in Europe, where his father, also a football player, played for most of his career. As a youth, he played for Belgium's youth teams, playing 27 games and scoring 13 goals between the under-15 and under-17 categories.

The midfielder, however, guarantees that the dream is always there. went to wear hopscotch. The possibility that seemed remote became real when he was 17 years old and received a visit from Alexandre Gallo, then coordinator of Brazil's youth divisions. Without hesitation, he accepted the invitation to leave Belgium for Brazil.

The opportunity for the main team would only come in 2018, with Tite, who called him up for friendlies. Andreas played 23 minutes of the match against El Salvador and had to wait almost six years before he got his chance again in March 2024, this time with Dorival Júnior.

"Of course it is very difficult to be away from the national team for so long, but I always believed and the people around me told me that I had to work hard to one day return. I always kept this dream alive and, thank God, after a long time of working very hard I am now reaping the rewards", celebrated the Fulham midfielder.

His first goal for the senior team came in the fourth match, his first as a starter. In addition to finding the net, Andreas performed well.

"It was an incredible, inexplicable feeling, I'm very happy, it still hasn't sunk in that I scored the first goal. A lot of things were going through my head at the time. , everything I went through to be here. It's been a dream since I was a child to score a goal for the national team and today I'm living that moment," he said.

All along. After more than a century of existence, the five-time world champion team included a few athletes born in other countries, but none of them managed to find the net. They were:

Sidney Pullen (English) - three games;

Casemiro do Amaral (Portuguese) - six games;

Francisco Police (Italian) - one game;

There are also disagreements about where Adolpho Milman, known as Russo, who played a hopscotch game, was born. Records point to Pelotas, in Rio Grande do Sul, as his hometown, but for many years there was a legend that he was born in a territory of the Russian empire in what is now Afghanistan. Years later, the family discovered that, in fact, the former striker was born in Argentina.