“It destroyed me: I fell into alcohol and cocaine”

The former Brazilian footballer Mario Jardel has confessed that being left out of the call for Brazil for him 2002 World Cup It marked the beginning of his self-destruction, to the point of falling into depression and ending up consuming alcohol and cocaine.

“From that moment on, my life was over,” he acknowledged in an interview published this Thursday in ‘La Gazzetta dello Sport’, in which he has also reported that he almost died from an overdose.

For the most nostalgic of football, Jardel He was one of the great center forwards of the late nineties and early 2000s, winner of two Golden Boots, idol in the Porto and the Sporting of Portugal and a real nightmare for Milan in the Champions League.

With a scoring talent that sparked the interest of big clubs like Barcelona and the Milanthe Brazilian had a dream that he never fulfilled: to play in a World Cup.

“I scored more goals than anyone else and I still can’t explain why Scolari decided not to call me up for Brazil for the 2002 World Cup,” he recalled.

And he added: “With the Porto I scored 168 goals in 175 games over four years, while in the season before the World Cup in Korea and Japan I scored 55 goals in 42 games with the team. Sporting Lisbon (…) I understand that that Brazilian team was full of phenomena, but it deserved at least a call-up.”

The career of ‘SuperMario’, as his fans called him, reached its peak in just six years, between 1996 and 2002.

From then on, his career took a radical turn and he began a complicated personal and professional journey that took him to eight different countries and even a brief period with Ancona in the 2003-2004 season, one of the worst teams in the entire history of the Italian Serie A, which would end up disappearing a few months later.

From that time, Jardel explains that he only has “bad memories”, although the worst was yet to come.

“In the summer of 2003 I tried cocaine (…) I liked it, it made me feel alive and not depressed. Once I was awake for a whole week. Then I overdosed, I almost died. and a friend who was with me saved me. I hit rock bottom there,” he confesses.

The Brazilian assures in the ‘Gazzetta’ that, although he never recovered mentally, today he is a man reconciled with himself thanks to psychiatric help and his family, until he managed to leave behind the world of drugs, which, at only thirty years old, destroyed his life.