‘God, luck and discipline’ led PSV defender André Ramalho to the top

He is not known as a defender, but his wife knows that André Ramalho can be ruthless. It was on a Wednesday in January 2011, when he had yet to turn nineteen, when the young Brazilian received a call from his trainer. Ramalho was allowed on trial with the second team of Red Bull Salzburg. If all went well, he could stay in Austria for the rest of the season. If not, he was back in São Paulo two weeks later.

An hour after the phone call, Ramalho was at the door of his girlfriend, with whom he had been together for two years. “To break up,” says the PSV footballer on a sultry Tuesday afternoon at the Herdgang, the club’s training complex. “She thought I was joking. But I only wanted to have one thing on my mind when I was in Austria. And I didn’t want to deal with the possibility that the internship could fail in any way.”

Ramalho (31) laughs a bit slyly when he thinks back about it. “I was still very young,” he says apologetically. Of course it is not either the ball or the love, Ramalho now knows. He made up for it. The girl he then put aside is now his wife. In a few weeks they are expecting their second child, a son.

Yet what he decided then, in youthful rashness, is in a way still typical of him, Ramalho acknowledges. For his determination – first to make it as a professional, later to reach the top. And for the extent to which football colors his life. So strong in fact that he spends as little time as possible on what is inevitably creeping closer: the moment he plays his last match.

“If I end my career, I will die a little inside,” says Ramalho. He has just come from the gym, where he worked out solo after the group training earlier in the day. Wild curly hair, calm eyes, a chain with a large cross around the neck. “I love it too much. I live football all day long. I do it, or I think about it. And it’s the only thing I can really do well, I think. Fortunately, I feel younger than I am, so I assume I still have years ahead of me.”

Listen to André Ramalho for a good hour and you realize that his unconditional love for the game has been a prerequisite for getting where he is now. Defender of Champions League participant PSV, which will face Arsenal in London this Wednesday. It is not entirely certain whether he will play; With newcomer Armel Bella-Kotchap and the recovered Frenchman Olivier Boscagli, PSV has three good candidates for the two central back positions. Coach Peter Bosz appreciates Ramalho. “I think he was our best player,” Bosz said after the last match, at home against NEC (4-0).

Four years in Salzburg, almost three years in Germany at Bayer Leverkusen and Mainz 05, another four years at Red Bull Salzburg and since the summer of 2021 at PSV. A whopping 400 games in total, 28 goals. These are the statistics of an even, almost self-evident football career in the European sub-top. But behind this there are countless “ups and downs”, says Ramalho. A constant and sometimes lonely battle to gain the trust of coaches and the public. He needed “God, luck and discipline” to stay afloat.

Aluminum factory

Ramalho grows up with an older brother in Alumínio, a town more than an hour’s drive from São Paulo. His father works as a laborer in the aluminum factory that gave the place its name and existence. “We had enough, we were neither poor nor rich,” he says. The whole family played football or talked about it, but according to Ramalho that is the standard in Brazil. He never experienced any pressure from his parents to pursue a professional life, he says. That hunt starts on his own initiative, when Ramalho is 12 and is asked to join the youth academy of top club São Paulo.

He is still a midfielder. Agile, smart, handy on the ball. Two and a half years later he has to leave again. Although you can just as easily interpret it positively, Ramalho says: he can stay at São Paulo for two and a half years. Not bad in an environment where millions of peers are interested in your position and boys are sent away every week. “If someone else is better for a moment, you are immediately out. You have to constantly show yourself. And if you have to leave, sometimes in the middle of the season, you have to find a new club very quickly.”

What does that do to a child? Not that much actually, he says, this is just the way it goes in Brazil. He doesn’t know any better. It only becomes difficult for him once he has fought his way back to the youth of the big Palmeiras through a small neighborhood club. He leaves home for it, but the trainer doesn’t see it in him and Ramalho is a reserve all year. He is not even allowed to raid.

“Mentally that’s how you have to be fucking be strong,” he says about that year. “I was sixteen, lived alone. I remember crying once after a workout. I couldn’t handle it anymore. I gave it my all, and they didn’t even look at me.”

In retrospect, he says, it was a valuable year. He learns to arm himself against what he experiences as the arbitrariness of football: coaches who may or may not like you for unknown reasons, clubs who may or may not dare to take you on.

He does not let it affect his self-confidence and controls himself when choices turn out badly for him. When he is sent away from Palmeiras after a hopeless year, for example. Or years later, when he reached the Champions League with Red Bull Salzburg and won the first match as a starter 6-2 against Genk, only to end up on the bench against Liverpool at Anfield.

“That was tough. I played pretty much everything. Other players said they were going to explode. But I’m not like that. The coach wanted a faster defender for that match. Of course I will give my opinion, say that I have played against fast attackers all my life and am experienced enough. But that’s the maximum. I don’t want to regret saying the wrong thing.”

Third level

Ramalho concentrates on his own game, his own development. The rest, he knows, is unpredictable. Also in a positive sense: after the rejection by Palmeiras, he registers online for test matches of a club that has just been founded: Red Bull Brasil. They play in a lower youth league, but the facilities are excellent and the club is affiliated with the Red Bull clubs from Leipzig and Salzburg. This way he – and not his former Palmeiras teammates – gets the chance to earn a professional contract in Europe.

That works, more or less: Ramalho signs with Salzburg at the age of nineteen, but spends the first seasons in Austria at the third level, with the promise team. That’s where the adventure seems to end. If it weren’t for the fact that he scored an important goal in June 2013 in the very last match of the season, as a result of which the U23 team was promoted. Salzburg’s sporting director, Ralf Rangnick, rewards Ramalho with a contract extension and a place in the first selection, where he gets to know trainer Roger Schmidt.

“That was the turning point in my career. I immediately had a starting spot under Schmidt. I came from the third level, with 300 spectators on the sidelines, two months later I played a European match against Fenerbahçe in front of 45,000 people. When you’re young, you need someone who trusts you, who believes in you. Sometimes you do everything right, but no one sees it. He was the man who saw me and said: this is my player.”

Schmidt has had a “special place” in his heart ever since. It was also he who brought him to PSV in 2021. He became a permanent fixture in Eindhoven, although Ramalho was never able to fully convince the PSV audience. A mistake in the crucial Champions League preliminary round against Rangers last August was particularly blamed on him. PSV missed the Champions League because of Ramalho, was the gist.

“That was the biggest mistake of my career. I was the last man, lost the ball, goal,” he says. Yet he thinks the criticism is exaggerated. “People judge me based on that one mistake. While: if you look at my entire career, I have never made these kinds of easy mistakes.”

He picks up a pen and pretends to write down a word. “Imagine if you spell it wrong. And you think: oof. That mistake is just like a pass for us. What if every time you do that, 30,000 people talk bad about you?”

He received hate messages on Instagram. “’I hope you have cancer’, that kind of thing. To me, my mother, my whole family. These are people who are pathetic inside. That doesn’t affect me. What gets me is the whole package: how important it was for the fans, the club, the players, for me. I have suffered more than anyone, believe me.”

While he was also part of the successes, he lists: two cup finals won, second place last season and recently he contributed to the qualification for the Champions League. Yet criticism of his game continues. “I have to try to put it aside and keep working, I trust my abilities,” he says. “I’m not just a PSV player, am I?”