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Football took Vinicius Tobias out of one of the most dangerous favelas in Brazil, Ermelino Matarazzo in São Paulo;
he stationed her in kyiv at the beginning of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine;
and a month later, after an anguished and uncertain journey, he deposited him in Valdebebas enrolled in the Real Madrid subsidiary.
The right-back for the Brazil Under-20s and Inter de Porto Alegre made the dream jump to Europe in January.
He was 17 years old and still could not sign a contract, but he had already reached an agreement with Shakhtar Donetsk, the Whites' rival in the Champions League on Wednesday.
He joined them in the Turkish city of Antalya, on the shores of the Mediterranean, where the Ukrainian and Russian teams flee the winter to train.
This year the talk was the rumor of an impending invasion.
In February they moved to kyiv.
On the 23rd, Vinicius Tobias turned 18 and was able to sign his contract.
The next day, before five in the morning, the first explosions of the military attack were heard in the city.
At nine o'clock the soccer player was already taking refuge with his wife in the bunker of the Opera hotel, owned by the owner of Shakhtar.
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Ukraine football war
About fifty people gathered in the room, known as the Symphony: the other 12 Brazilian soccer players on the team, and some from other clubs, their families, the coaching staff of Italian Roberto de Zerbi (now at Brighton), the Portuguese coach of Lille, Paulo Fonseca, and Croatian Darija Srna, Shakhtar's sports director.
Some embassies moved faster than others.
In the first hours, Portugal took out Fonseca and two other people, and Italy organized the evacuation of its citizens, although De Zerbi and his people did not want to leave if the Brazilians could not leave as well.
But his diplomatic legation was not very promising.
The days passed, with the sound of the bombs in the background, and the anguish in the bunker grew.
The group was approached by dubious hustlers who offered to take them out of the country in exchange for huge amounts of money, according to the account of a source close to the refugees.
Faced with desperation due to the feeling of abandonment, the footballers came to decide to pay.
But then the UEFA president appeared.
Srna told it: “I called Mr. Ceferin and cried on the phone.
I couldn't see the footballers and their families defenseless and crying."
Then began an operation to get them out of there, led by the highest levels of the governing body of European football.
After five days in the bunker, the group was directed to board a train for Lviv, near the Polish border.
The Ukrainian federation saw to it that they could get through the chaos of a station packed with thousands of terrified people trying to flee from advancing Russian troops.
During the seven-hour drive they received another call.
They were not to get off at Lviv.
At that time it took more than a day and a half to cross into Poland.
They had to continue on the same train to Romania, another ten hours, with little water, no food.
But the Romanian border was also stuck and another call warned them that they would not be able to get out there.
He told them to get on a bus that would be waiting for them to drive them to the border with Moldova.
Another seven hours of travel.
There the situation did not look much better: the queue at the border crossing was about three kilometers long.
But UEFA had made arrangements with the Moldovan federation, and they were assured that the police would be waiting for them.
That's how it was: the agents allowed them to skip the queue and they managed to leave Ukraine.
On the other side, they all burst into tears.
Two days later, Vinicius Tobias was back in São Paulo with his family, while his agents held negotiations with a dozen European clubs.
Until the interest of Florentino Pérez appeared and they told him that he was going to Madrid.
“To what?” he asked puzzled.
A month after leaving the bunker, the Brazilian footballer arrived in Valdebebas to play on loan from Shakhtar at Castilla, and this season Madrid, after a promising pre-season, has included him on the list to play in the Champions League, which allows him to meet again with his former teammates.
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