Paulinho: ‘Everyone said: “Bah, his career is over.” Now I’m at Barça. That’s football’

The Brazilian midfielder almost quit football at the age of 19, was written off after leaving Tottenham for China in 2015 but is now preparing for his first clásico having silenced his critics at Barcelona

”I told him I didn’t want to play any more. He was phoning and phoning but I said: ‘I’m not going to play.’” The calls came, the president on the line, but José Paulo Bezerra Maciel Júnior – better known as Paulinho, hardly known at all then – had made up his mind. He had headed home to São Paulo, yet rather than returning to his boyhood club he was giving up on the game. He had had enough, aged 19. “In Lithuania they had racially abused me, in Poland they hadn’t paid me, and I thought: ‘I don’t need this,’” he says. “I said to my family: ‘I’m not playing football again.’”

Which was when his then-wife intervened, telling him to think about his parents – a council worker and a supermarket manager who had supported him since he started playing at the age of five. Ditching it all would, she said, show a lack of respect to them. Paulinho and his wife had just had a baby daughter too and, besides, she asked: ‘What else can you do?’ It is a good question. What would he have done? Paulinho smiles. “I really don’t know,” he says. “She said: ‘The only thing you know how to do is play football.’” And so that is what he did.

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