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The Emperor!

The kid from Rio is still beating in the hearts of Nerazzurri fans everywhere…

The Emperor!

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Welcome to MUNDIAL’s Goal of the Month. The rules are pretty simple. Every four weeks, we will be delving into the memory banks and picking our favourite goal scored during that month at any point in footballing history. We can pick from any league, from MLS to the Combined Counties. Any player, from Lionel Messi to those we play five-a-side with, and from any year. Got it? Good. 

For January, we’ve been a bit cheeky. When we went searching for this month’s goal we noticed that a certain apex predator scored a brace against Cagliari 19 years ago. Both goals were a bit crap—a tap-in and a penalty—but even if there's the most tenuous opening to talk about Adriano, we’re going to take it. Here is why The Emperor will live on in Inter fans’ hearts and minds forever.


“On 14 August 2001, I was at the Bernabeu, wearing an Inter shirt, and we were up against Real,” Adriano wrote to Inter fans a couple of years ago about his very first match for the club—a Santiago Bernabeu Trophy final. “That in itself would have been enough for me. But then I got out onto the pitch. I didn't think about it—it was just like I was playing on that dusty pitch in Vila Cruzeiro. I began dribbling around, trying to nutmeg people. Everything came off for me. I won a free kick, and on the sidelines they were calling for me to have a shot. Remember that left-footed shot I’d always practised at home and in the streets that drove my mum crazy? That day I introduced it to the world with that free kick. They say that shot reached 170 kilometres an hour!” 

Adriano had put on a clinic.

The ins and outs of his transfer from Flamengo to Inter in the summer of 2001, the loan to Fiorentina, the half-sale to Parma, and then the buy-back in January 2003, is confusing. What isn’t confusing is the effect he had on Inter fans. Marco Rizzi, an Inter fan and part of the Scarpe footwear podcast, told us all about it while driving through the Milanese rain this afternoon…

“I’ve just messaged two of my friends—they both have supported Inter in the exact same way as me, we’re pretty much the same age, so we’ve been brought up on the same teams—to say ‘guess who is going to cry on the phone today?’ I don’t know if there is another Inter player who brings through these types of feelings, these ties, like Adriano.