Diniz tells how Brenner recovered in São Paulo: “I needed to take football seriously” | good friends!

Since his arrival in São Paulo, Diniz recovered several athletes, mainly from the base categories, and transformed them into essential players of the team.

+ Diniz: “I would not serve in six days. Today I must be serving”

– While I was a gamer, what I saw the most is a distortion that I try to correct. A player who plays well becomes a good person, who plays poorly becomes a person who should not be respected. That was one of the things that made me suffer the most as a professional player. This ends up killing many talents early on. This is hard to bear.

– We have the illusion that the player who reaches 13, 14 years old, like Brenner, will be the solution. But the base has very little human part. Players go to school to spend the year. In the basic categories you have to give feedback to someone, you have to play well to please an entrepreneur, a mother, a father … They always pressure you to accept it. For the human being this is very bad – said the trainer in “Good, friends!” this Monday.

One of the athletes who has grown the most after having worked precisely on this human part is Brenner. The 20-year-old forward was revealed by São Paulo at 17, but until this season he had not emerged as the expected promise.

Fernando Diniz took him to Fluminense in 2019, and since then he has reached out to Brenner to try and change his relationship with football. People close to the player believe that going to the professionals directly from the U-17 (without going through the U-20) hindered their training.

– In my role as coach, what I like the most is being able to promote the well-being of the people who work with me, especially the players. Brenner is a player who came to São Paulo at age 13. A child who cried a lot in Cotia. Now he has been hitting his head since he came up at 17 and we think he will fix all the club’s problems. Brenner almost went into fourth year without playing. And it wasn’t a conversation I had with Brenner, it was several conversations. I took it to the Fluminense at zero cost. There we began our close relationship – said Diniz.

– When I got to São Paulo I asked him to come back. I convinced Brenner that he needed to change, he needed to take football seriously, because football has a lot to give. Today he is much more supportive, more responsible, disciplined, he likes to help others. These are human characteristics, I did not teach Brenner to play soccer. I speak little to him about positioning, the one that gives me solutions with the goals he makes. In our team, the way I propose football, whoever has that ability to help, to be supportive and to give themselves to the team, ends up being benefited – he added.

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