Kaka’s special year keeps getting better
When it comes to soccer players, Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite, better known simply as Kaka, was born on the wrong side of the tracks.
Whereas most of the sport’s truly great stars -- Pele, Diego Maradona, Johan Cruyff, George Best, Thierry Henry -- came from impoverished backgrounds, Kaka is from a relatively well-to-do family.
Just because he had a few more reais than most to spend in his hometown of Brasilia doesn’t mean everything came easily for the Brazilian midfielder.
But the 25-year-old has clearly ascended to the top of his game, and Kaka, who already has snared two “world’s best player” awards in 2007, is favored to win two more despite stiff competition from Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo and Argentina’s Lionel Messi.
On Sunday France Football magazine presented its Balon d’Or (Golden Ball) award to Kaka as the best player in the world. The magazine had been giving an award to the best player in Europe annually since 1956 but this year changed the award’s scope and opened it to all players worldwide. Kaka got the nod over Ronaldo, who finished second in the voting, and Messi came in third. “It’s been a special year for me; this award underlines that,” Kaka said.
Meanwhile, in October he was named the Federation Internationale des Associations de Footballers Professionels 2007 world player of the year after guiding AC Milan to the European Champions Cup in May and finishing as the competition’s top goal scorer. The FIFPro award is considered a prestigious one because the group is made up of about 45,000 professional players around the globe -- who voted Kaka as their sport’s best player.
“I am humbled to receive such an honor,” Kaka said. “To be recognized by my fellow professional players worldwide is amazing.”
Similar honors are likely to follow.
Kaka -- the nickname was given to him as a child by his younger brother -- also is favored to be the choice of London’s World Soccer magazine, which has honored the game’s finest annually since 1982.
But the climax will be Dec. 17, when the swank FIFA World Player Gala is held at the Zurich Opera House and Kaka is expected to be named FIFA’s world player of the year.
These accomplishments are all the more remarkable because Kaka suffers from myopia, although few fans or opponents realize that he has to wear contact lenses when he is on the field.
But poor eyesight was not what almost ended Kaka’s career before it had really begun.
In 2000, when he was 18 and playing for Sao Paulo, a club he had joined at age 8, he slipped on a diving board at a swimming pool and fractured a vertebra in his back. It was a considered a potentially paralysis-causing injury.
Against the odds, Kaka recovered fully. He broke into Sao Paulo’s starting lineup the following year and early in 2002 made his national team debut for Brazil, helping it win the World Cup later that year, albeit in a minor role behind the likes of Ronaldo, Ronaldinho and Roberto Carlos.
Not surprisingly, these experiences caused the already religiously inclined Kaka to become even more fervent in his belief. These days, he proclaims his faith on T-shirts worn beneath his game jerseys and on the tongue of his soccer cleats. After each goal he scores, he points to the heavens.
Sao Paulo, meanwhile, was always going to be only a way station. After long being watched from afar by European teams, Kaka was snapped up by AC Milan in 2003. At the time, Silvio Berlusconi, the club’s president and then Italy’s prime minister, called the $8.6-million acquisition a bargain.
That it has been.
A versatile player comfortable up front, wide on either wing, or in a central attacking midfield role, Kaka was the driving force behind AC Milan winning Italy’s Serie A title in 2004 and, far more important, in reaching the European Champions League final in 2005 and again in 2007.
Milan played Liverpool both times, losing the first and winning the second.
It was in the second leg of this year’s semifinal, with AC Milan trailing Ronaldo’s Manchester United, 3-2, after the first game in England, that the stage was set for Kaka.
Before the match in Italy, AC Milan Coach Carlo Ancelotti made a prediction. “Kaka and Ronaldo are the world’s two best players,” he said. “Who is best will come down to who can decide the outcome of the game.”
Kaka did so, scoring a hat trick as Milan won, 3-0. He then helped undo Liverpool, 2-1, in the final in Athens on May 23, after which he was quickly dubbed the world’s best by The Times of London, Germany’s Kicker magazine and Italy’s Gazzetta dello Sport.
And when the kid with the bad eyes, the kid whose $8.9-million-a-year after-tax salary is the highest of any player in Italy, the kid who tithes his salary to the church, is named FIFA’s world player of the year -- very few will say it was not deserved.
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