Liverpool’s £67m man Alisson almost quit football for being ‘short and fat’ but incredible coach saved career
Reds' latest huge-money signing is set to rock the Premier League this season after impressing with Roma and Brazil
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DANIEL PAVAN will be the proudest man in Brazil next month when Alisson makes his Premier League bow for Liverpool.
That is because only a decade ago Pavan feared Alisson would be lost to the game — because he was considered too FAT and too SMALL.
Alisson, now a strapping 6ft 4in, struggled during his early days at Internacional’s youth academy.
The main issues were his weight — he had a fondness for soft drinks and cookies — and a lack of growth as a teenager stunting his progression into the first team.
Liverpool’s new £67million star — the world’s costliest goalkeeper — even came under pressure from his middle-class parents to stop training and instead continue with his studies.
Yet Pavan, the goalkeeping coach at the Brazilian club, told SunSport he played a pivotal role in Alisson’s career, persuading his protege to persevere for at least one more year.
Pavan said: “I felt happy and very proud to see Alisson play at a World Cup and now move to one of the biggest clubs in the world.
“When Alisson started he had a slower maturation than the other boys, this made him a shorter keeper and one with weight above the others.
“This made him often deprived of a position in the starting line-up and sometimes even the bench. One day his parents came looking for me, thinking he had no future in the profession and they wanted to get him out of football.
“They thought he had more future in his studies and that he should leave the club. But I managed to convince them Alisson was still going to grow to maturity for his age and would have a great future as a keeper.
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“Genetically, he was slower than the boys of his age but with different technical gestures — we bet on his growth from the first moment.
“And thank God they heard me. A year later he had grown 6.5in. From there, he even started to be called to the Brazilian base teams.”
Pavan remains close to Alisson, even though he moved from Internacional to Roma in 2016, and often exchanges texts.
And he has seen him go on to star as Brazil’s No 1 at this summer’s World Cup in Russia, before clinching that mega-money move to Anfield.
The coach added: “Of the 13 years that he was at Internacional, eight were spent working with me.
“They were years of learning and teaching in all areas. I think we contributed much to Alisson as an athlete, a man and a citizen.
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“In all our time together, we surpassed the athlete-coach relationship, became personal friends and still speak to this day. I’m a family friend.”
Alisson, who has a German heritage, will join his new Liverpool team-mates for the first time this week on a training camp in Evian, France.
Born in October 1992, he grew up in Novo Hamburgo, which is more than 24miles from Porto Alegre.
His mother is a real estate broker, his father worked in the leather and footwear sector and his 31-year-old brother Muriel plays football for Belenenses in Portugal’s top flight.
And Pavan claims stereotypes of South American keepers being risk-takers or unreliable do not apply to Alisson.
He said: “It’s very difficult to point out a weak point. Alisson dominates all the fundamentals of the position and combines this with a strong personality. He is very cool and quiet inside the penalty area.
“He has an exemplary family structure, which has always been a great support for him to become one of the best keepers in the world. Even today his parents continue to work and have always worked hard to give their children total conditions to succeed.”