Do you remember.... When Bruno Fernandes played in Italy?
Time to pull the curtain back and look at the man behind the 'hero-ball'.
Time for a history lesson or I should really say, an origin story.
For many football fans, their first introduction to Bruno Fernandes was at Sporting CP; ‘Have you seen that Portuguese guy who’s contributed to 50 goals (I know no one actually speaks like this), he’s been linked with Manchester United and Tottenham’.
Of course, he would move to Manchester United in the January of 2020 and his first 18 months would be transformative for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s side, they now had a talisman to build around.
His output was crucial to United’s second-placed finish in 2020/21 and also their Europa League run that saw them lose in the final to Villarreal, reaching double figures in both goals and assists.
We won’t go into the nuances of Fernandes in the modern day since he seems to be incredibly divisive amongst the United fan base (I still think he’s a great player but frustrating at times), but we'll look back instead. For Fernandes’ move to United wasn’t the first time he had ventured outside his homeland.
In fact, before he was snatching the headlines, the billboards and every slot on TV at Sporting, he had spent five seasons in Italy and this is where the foundations of the Bruno Fernandes we know today were laid.
It was there that he made his senior debut, for Novara in Serie B. A product of Boavista’s academy he would make the switch to the Italian team’s youth side in 2012.
I don’t know if this adds any context to the discussion of how Bruno plays football, but while writing this I found out that he only became an attacking midfield at the age of 15, having primarily played centre-back in Boavista’s academy. Maybe it explains the searching long balls he tries from deeper positions, I don’t know.
But back to Italy.
Sporting a haircut not dissimilar to the one that fellow countryman Joao Felix now has, Bruno would break onto the scene for Novara’s first team in the same season he joined, 2012-13.
Speaking to First Time Finish in 2020, former Novara midfielder Daniele Buzzagoli who played with Bruno back in the 2012-13 season could only sing his praises:
“From the first training [session] we saw that he had something inside and an incredible natural attitude. Both technically and for his vision of the game, he was the best of us. This immediately impressed us.
“He was very shy as he moved quickly from [Giacomo] Gattuso’s youth team to the first team. But on the field he was a force.”
When Bruno was promoted to the first team in January the team were worried about potential back-to-back relegations down to Serie C, by the end of the season they were 5th and in the playoffs.
The fans heralded him as ‘The Maradona of Novara’ and ‘the mini Rui Costa’ due to his tricky footwork (he was a much better dribbler back then) and his inexplicable vision. Again, I’d like to point out this guy was playing in defence as late as 2009… The Hangover movie was in the cinema and he could go see it and yet he wasn’t being deployed in the position he would go on to have a long and successful career in.
He scored four goals and registered two assists in 1312 minutes of playtime, but it was his mentality that the Novara staff noted the most.
Mauro Borghetti was Novara’s head of scouting and he uncovered Bruno in Boavista’s academy before sanctioning his purchase for around €40,000. He told StatsPerform:
"On a Saturday morning I took a flight to Portugal to watch an Under-19 Boavista game. He struck me for the characteristics he is showing now, although he didn't shine that much in that game. But I could see his skills and his personality on top of his creativity."
"Bruno is a very smart guy so he settled in right away at Novara. In one week, 10 days tops, he started communicating with the group in Italian, an example of his intelligence. This helped him a lot as much as the fact of being the only foreigner, the only Portuguese, in a full Italian squad. This helped him get involved faster, he was basically forced to speak Italian. He settled down so quickly and this helped him a lot."
This spell at Novara would be the building blocks of the mentality we see from Bruno today. Young Portuguese talents usually stay in Portugal; Fernandes had gone against that curve.
But the Novara coach, Carlo Perrone, was not going to make any allowances for him, forbidding the team to speak to him in anything but Italian (this might be why he forced himself to learn it so quickly). This isolation affected Bruno greatly however, in his ‘Cover your Ears’ article for The Player’s Tribune he stated:
A few years later, I went to play abroad in Italy, and I was tested. I was all on my own at 17 in a new country. I didn’t speak the language, and I didn’t know anyone, and let me tell you, it was hard. It was unbelievably hard and lonely. There were times when I wanted to quit, absolutely.
In the end, he got over that hill and came out the other side a highly sought-after talent within Italy. Juventus and Inter Milan came calling in the summer of 2013, but Bruno didn’t want to go back to being a bit part-player or a prospect in an academy system, he had worked hard to get into the spotlight and he wanted to stay there.
So he signed with Udinese with the guarantee that he would be part of the first team. He would spend three seasons with Le Zebrette scoring 11 goals and registering 13 assists.
Not an incredible return, but for an 18-21-year-old that is completely respectable. They can’t all be Kylian Mbappe or Erling Haaland.
However, the most significant part of his spell at Udinese is that he would meet one of the most important players in his career, Antonio di Natale, and the Bruno that rivals fans love to hate would begin to take form.
If it wasn’t clear to you already Bruno is a striker who can play some nice passes, runs around a lot, and links up reasonably well so people think he’s a midfielder, but the further away you move him from the net the less effective he’s going to be.
I said earlier that his stint at centre-back may have contributed to his searching balls from deep. That may be part of the reason but I think it’s mainly because he works with a striker mentality; every action he makes should in some way lead to a shot on goal.
The Italians would refer to him as a ‘Trequartista’, in England, we would call him a ‘Shadow Striker’.
It’s obvious, that was the role he thrived in under Solskjaer, but still, I see people saying he should play deeper so just thought I nip that in the bud there.
Di Natale, who was in his 30s at this point, saw the potential of the young Portuguese ‘Trequartista’ and took him under his wing. When Fernandes signed for United in 2020, European Expert Andy Brassell spoke on the Kelly & Wrighty Show about Di Natale’s mentorship:
“He took Bruno Fernandes on as like a sort of pet project. He was like ‘Right, this is how you strike the ball, this is how your body shape has to be, this is when you let go of the ball and this is when you don’t let go of the ball, this is where you place yourself when you’re not on the ball’.
“He just painstakingly went through everything for him and to have a player of that standard, of that technique, not only give you the advice that helps you kick on but the confidence by showing you ‘Right, I think you’re special and I’m going to work on you’, I think that’s very, very important.”
However, Di Natale wasn’t immune to being frustrated by Fernandes, just as United fans aren’t today. He told the Italian media at the time:
“He irritates me, because he’s very young and has more ability than any of us – he’s got two incredible feet, but sometimes he drifts through games.”
The talent was there, but Udinese did not want to wait to see the fruits of Di Natale’s labour nor did Bruno believe Udinese matched his ever-growing ambition, so in 2016 he was loaned to Sampdoria with an obligation to buy.
Would he prove his former club wrong and reap the benefits of the veteran Italian striker’s mentorship? Well no, but his new club weren’t particularly ambitious themselves either, happy with their 10th-placed finish.
He would score five goals and register two assists. However, this is one of those cases where the output does not do justice to how well he actually played.
Fellow abandoned Udinese project Luis Muriel would come under fire in the Italian media throughout the season for failing to convert a number of chances created for him by Fernandes. Furthermore, Bruno’s ability to find space was also lauded.
He would ghost past defenders to find pockets in behind or arrive late in the box to latch onto chances, and it shows that Di Natale’s teachings had taken hold.
For example against Fiorentina, where Fernandes curved his run from the left-hand side to pick a through-ball up on the right, before smashing it past the goalkeeper from outside the box with his first touch. His deeper role restricted him, but he still had flashes of brilliance.
And this is exactly why Sporting sanctioned an €8.5m deal for him in 2017 and the rest as we know, is history.
Bruno Fernandes’ time in Italy is not the most prolific and when we look back on his career in the future it will likely be reduced to a footnote or introductory paragraph before going straight into his heroics at Sporting, but they are in many ways these are the most important years for understanding why Bruno is the player he is now.
Those five years were where the prototype for the best version of Bruno Fernandes was formed - the goalscorer who plays off a more traditional number nine; the hard-working intelligent ‘Trequartista’ who earns the respect of his teammates and leads by example.
He may be frustrating at times, as Di Natale attested to nearly a decade ago, but under Erik ten Hag he will hopefully be put in more situations where we can see ‘Bruno the Shadow Striker’ running late into the box and finding space in front of the net, rather than ‘Bruno the Hero-Ball Merchant’ who many United fans can not stand.