Real Madrid

Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite, known in the football world as Kaka, was born on 22 April 1982 in Brasila. His father is an engineer and his mother a teacher, a situation that allowed him to grow up in a middle-class atmosphere. He moved to Sao Paulo when he was four years old and began playing football in that city. AS journalist Julio Maldonado gives us a glimpse of the life of Kaka in a series of articles.

His preferred book is the Bible and he plays like the angels, with elegance, precision and football from another dimension. There is no doubt that Kaka is different. He isn’t even the classic Brazilian player that was raised in the favelas and amidst misery. Not him. Bosco, his father, is a civil engineer, so Kaka never went hungry. He never knew misery. He first encountered it when he was 12 years old and accompanied his mother to a course in the favelas of Sao Paulo. That’s when he first found out how privileged he was. He never suffered from poverty, which didn’t stop him from becoming a UN ambassador against hunger a few years later. He has always set a great example and once even spearheaded a campaign led by his church, Renascer, against drugs.

But let’s start at the beginning. Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite was born in Brasilia on 22 April 1922, just before Zico’s great Brazilian team crashed in the 1982 World Cup of Spain. Simone -his mother- is a teacher, and Bosco -his father- a civil engineer. Kaka lived in Brasilia for four years before leaving for Cuiaba because of his father’s job, and later landing in Sao Paulo. Kaka was four years old when the family moved to Monte Alegre Street, on the west side of Sao Paulo.

He was soon given the nickname ‘Kaka’ and one of the first gifts he ever had was a football. The nickname was born from his little brother’s difficulty in pronouncing the name Ricardo. Kaka studied hard and never gave signs of wanting to become a player. He once said he would have liked to be an engineer, like his dad, but he joined the futsal team at Baptista Brasileiro School, where he was known as Ricardinho. His grades were excellent, especially in math and religion, but he stood out on the futsal team. His mother signed him up at Andres Cordoba’s football academy in 1989, who later sent him to Alphaville Tennis Club to be part of Soccer Brazil and play a game outside the country. He was the top-scorer of La Serena Tournament (Chile, 1993).

Realizing his potential, and soon after signing him up at Objetivo School thanks to a student grant, his parents decided he should try his luck at Sao Paulo FC. Kaka surprised the technical staff, but they found he was too frail because he was a couple of years too young. Nevertheless, impressed by his quality, the club's medical staff designed a specific development plan for him and Kaka soon started to shine again. He was two years younger than the rest of his team-mates which explains why he was benched so often, but his magic moment arrived soon enough.

First team coach Valdao asked for a midfielder and a forward from the youth system the day before a game and Kaka was given a chance. Once he trained with the first teamers, he never looked back again.