Silent Protagonist: the story of Rodrigo Mora

Some players are so aesthetic with a football you feel they were ordained to play.

Rodrigo Mora is Porto’s latest teenage sensation. A silky, diminutive playmaker who weaves through thickets of defenders, Mora is the kind of player who makes you feel like a kid again; once you’ve seen him pick the ball up once, all you want is to see it at his feet over, and over. He’s old-school in a modern game, always a step ahead, and plays as if everyone else is in slow motion. The kind of player worth the price of admission alone - I imagine, one day soon, he’ll have a legion of followers buying tickets just to watch him play.

At 18-years-old, he already has Porto fans - and me - waxing lyrical. Meanwhile, Portugal are talking about him as the next best thing since João Félix and Cristiano Ronaldo.

But as the hype grows, Mora himself seems unfazed.

He’s no stranger to attention. For the last decade, Mora has been considered the best prospect in Matosinhos, a Portuguese metropolitan district bordered by Porto and, in the west, the stretching Atlantic Ocean. He was born among the district’s old white stone, and that’s where Ricardo Afonso first saw him play.

“My team had played against him the previous year,” Afonso, who holds a UEFA B Licence and was coaching Sporting CP’s U-13s at the time, recalls to SCOUTED. “He stood out for his technical capacity and ability to see everything inside the game before the others. The speed of thought and execution was special already at that time.”

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