He still dreams of the horses. They roam the fields and ranches around São Mateus, stroll untethered along the roadside, take morning constitutionals on the sand. There are pedigree breeders and rodeo shows dotted around the province. When he was a kid he used to ride the life out of them, but he doesn’t really do that any more for insurance reasons. Instead, he owns and breeds them, tracks their progress through pictures and videos sent by family members, a little slice of Espírito Santo flickering on a phone screen in Manchester.
For him the horse represents home, hearth, familiar comforts, but there’s a lot more to it than that. It’s freedom, the open pasture, the ability to go where you want, at whatever pace you want, for whatever reason you want. But of course you don’t just get on a horse and ride. It takes months, years, to build that understanding, to kindle the magic, to train without ever quite taming. For Savinho the equestrian, as with Savinho the footballer, the only true freedom comes through a long, disciplined process of control.
It’s mid-July when Savinho arrives at the Etihad Campus for his first day as a Manchester City player. The previous day he was at home on the ranch with the horses. Now he’s being confronted by the sight of Jack Grealish in his pants going in for a big hug: “Hey brother, you OK, you training today? Welcome bro, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it …” Savinho’s face betrays only a partial comprehension. His English is still only at a rudimentary level, and his Grealish will take several more months beyond that.
On the wall of the players’ gym, in big bold letters, are printed the words: “Those who forget their past compromise their future.” In just a short few weeks as a City player since signing from Troyes in the summer, Savinho has inspired numerous comparisons to City greats of recent vintage. The Riyad Mahrez parallels are surely deliberate, given the decision to assign his old No 26 shirt to another diminutive left-footed winger with a talent for cutting in off the right wing. The baby face and the ringing phone celebration evoke Gabriel Jesus. The crazy directness of his dribbling, the unerring ability to beat his man and get to the byline, are a little bit Leroy Sané.
In any case, you do not walk straight into the best team in the world unless you have something about you. Thus far Savinho has started all four Premier League games for which he has been available, along with the Champions League game against Inter. And for all the glowing tributes that accompanied him on his move to City in the summer, after a breakthrough campaign on loan at Girona last season, few expected the 20-year-old to establish himself so soon. So how has it happened?
Pep Guardiola offered a few clues recently when he highlighted Savinho’s stamina. “I know he can play every three or four days,” he said. “This is one of the details we look at. Otherwise he cannot play in the big teams.” But he also drew attention to the fact that Savinho – unlike Grealish, or Oscar Bobb, or Bernardo Silva – can operate on both flanks.
Last season at Girona, Savinho operated mainly on the left side, leading La Liga for completed dribbles, earning an international debut at Wembley and a place in Brazil’s Copa América squad. This was also where he featured against Manchester United in the Community Shield, and early on against Chelsea on the opening day. Shortly after City took the lead in that game, however, Guardiola switched Savinho to his favoured right flank, where he has stayed ever since.
It helps, too, that Savinho can follow a plan. There is hunger and intensity off the ball, the ability to hold the ball up in advanced areas. Witness, for example, his role in City’s opening goal against Arsenal at the weekend, where he creates the illusion of stasis on the right before suddenly switching inside, putting Riccardo Calafiori out of the game and laying on the pass from which Erling Haaland scores.
After that game, Savinho joked that Haaland had been pressuring him to lay on more assists, and on this early evidence it feels evident that this is a selection made with Haaland in mind. Savinho is not yet a consistently elite finisher, nor a particularly prolific source of goals, but he is excellent at either spinning outside his man and putting over a cross, or spinning inside and playing a through ball.
In many ways Savinho feels like the last part of the jigsaw, or at least the culmination of a long-gestated plan. It is now more than two years since he was brought to Europe by Troyes, an arm of the City Football Group, with commendably little pretence over where his ultimate fate lay. “I have the goal of playing for City,” he said at the time he was moved on to Girona, another CFG-affiliated club. “When I was hired my goal was always to get to City, and I’m working towards that.”
Savinho never did play for Troyes. Instead, when he was injured, City would fly him over for treatment. When the first team went on a pre-season tour, Girona were invited to use City’s facilities, allowing Savinho to familiarise himself with the place. And in a sense Savinho is perhaps the first real success story of the CFG multi-club universe, the perfection of a model erected not simply to buy and inflate assets, but to nurture and provide a pipeline of talent that City might one day be able to use.
But there is, of course, a paradox here. In one sense, Savinho is the ultimate modern footballer: a product of accountancy and paperwork and complex regulatory forces only barely within his comprehension. In another, he remains a player of pure inspiration, a product of the land, who describes his strengths as “playing joyful football”, “taking on opponents, being happy, getting the crowd on their feet”. And perhaps this is the sort of thing that has been badly missing at City of late, a club consumed with the obsession of winning, on a permanent war footing, nervously ticking down the last indeterminate fragments of the Guardiola era and fighting court cases and scepticism everywhere they look.
Is it a stretch to imagine that, amid a weekly torrent of questions about litigation and deception, amid the strains of maintaining one of the most adored and abhorred winning machines in sport, Guardiola sees in Savinho something of the joy that first attracted him to the sport? A kid, and a ball, and a world of possibility. The sort of freedom that only comes through pure mastery.
Perhaps once Phil Foden completes his forestalled pre-season, or Bobb recovers from his fractured leg, once the season begins to sharpen to a point and the games begin to accumulate weight, Savinho will find his minutes more limited. But for now he stands as a kind of throwback: not just a breathlessly effective player, but perhaps a reminder of better, freer times.
