Luis Suarez is one of Liverpool’s greatest ever Premier League players. Yet the controversial Uruguayan was only ever passing through Anfield when the Reds signed him from Ajax in a £22.8m deal in January 2011.
Netting 82 goals from just 133 games, including the most astonishing individual campaign in 2013/14 as he scored 31 goals in 33 matches to nearly deliver an elusive Premier League title to Liverpool, the forward wowed Kopites for three and a half years before departing for Barcelona under a cloud, having been suspended by FIFA for four months after biting Giorgio Chiellini at the 2014 World Cup.
Yet by getting his £65m move to the Catalans in July 2014, the striker successfully completed a career plan that had been 11 years in the making. From Nacional to Groningen, to Ajax and then Liverpool, every move was taken with one eventual sight in mind - Barcelona.
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Suarez, in part, owes his career to his wife and childhood sweetheart, Sofia Balbi. He began dating her at age 15 in Montevideo, when just a year earlier boyhood club, Nacional, had told him they wanted to release him because he was going out at night and not behaving as he ought to.
By age 16, he was totally focused on football. “Sofi showed me another way. My career might have ended right there,” he admitted in his 2014 autobiography. “The fact that I was able to choose the right path owes so much to Sofi; If I had not met her I don’t know what would have happened to me.
“I used to play on Saturdays and I would stay at Sofi’s house on Saturday nights and spend Sunday with her. If I had not met her, I would have been out, mixing with people who I shouldn’t have been mixing with. I might have done very different things and ended up a different person.”
Yet Suarez’s world was rocked in October 2003 when the Balbi family moved to Barcelona and he thought he’d never see Sofia again. Growing up in poverty in Salto and Montevideo, he already couldn’t afford the forty pesos (roughly £1) fare it cost to make the 40km round trip to see Sofia, who lived just outside of the city in Solymar, and would pester Nacional directors for loans to fund his bus trips.
“I thought it was the last time I would see her,” he recalled. “I thought it was the end of our relationship and the end of my world. How was I going to be able to go to Barcelona from Uruguay if I could hardly raise the funds to go from Montevideo to Solymar.
“From now on it would no longer be about scraping together enough money to visit Sofi by gathering telephone cards; it would be about scraping together enough money to call her on the telephone.”
Fortunately for Suarez, his agent at the time, Daniel Fonseca, paid for the young forward to travel to Barcelona for a visit in December 2003. And as he spent his first New Year’s Eve together with Sofia, he knew what he wanted to do with his life and career.
“I wanted to play in Europe and to be with Sofi.”
During that first trip to Spain, Suarez was called up by the Nacional first team squad for the first time for pre-season training. The following year he would be promoted permanently and made his debut in the Copa Libertadores in March 2005.
Yet he started slowly at Nacional. “The explosive form that would get me my move (to Europe) was still some way off,” he recalled. “At first, I missed chances. Lots and lots of them. It reached the point where people insulted me and whistled me.
“They called me pata pala, club foot. Others called me burro or donkey… even now I meet people who say to me: 'I used to insult you, I used to shout at you, I was one of those people who thought you were never going to score any goals.'”
Yet Suarez found form in 2005/06 as Nacional won the Primera Division, scoring 10 goals from 27 league appearances. And one against Defensor Sporting helped earn him that long-desired move to Europe.
“We were fighting it out for the title and I put in my best performance of the season, scoring a goal,” he said. “I had no idea they were watching me and I’d never heard of Groningen but I knew it was closer to Barcelona than Montevideo was.
“Playing so well and scoring such a good goal in front of scouts who weren’t even meant to be watching me was just the stroke of luck I needed. I felt I had earned it too.
“It had been a long hard road through the youth ranks at Nacional. I survived that career blip when it seemed they would be letting me go because I wasn’t sufficiently focused.”
It might have been a long road through the youth ranks, but Suarez only spent one full season with the Nacional first team before leaving for Groningen when only 19 in 2006. There he was reunited with Sofia as, despite being only 16, she boarded a plane with him but no bag or clothes and went with him to make a life in the Netherlands.
Suarez’s time at Nacional was arguably a whirlwind and the first step towards getting to Barcelona. Unsavoury exits would follow as as he brought his case to the KNVB in an attempt to force through a transfer to Ajax in 2007, just a year after joining Groningen, while he was suspended from domestic action for biting Otman Bakkal, and branded the 'Cannibal of Ajax', before his move to Anfield.
Meanwhile, he would essentially down tools in a failed bid to force through a controversial move to Arsenal in the summer of 2013, at a time when he was also suspended for a bite on Branislav Ivanovic, before finally joining Barcelona in 2014.
Suarez enjoyed six incredible seasons at Camp Nou, scoring 198 goals from 283 appearances to become the Catalans’ third all-time greatest goalscorer, and would win four La Liga titles, the Champions League, the FIFA Club World Cup, four Copa del Reys, two Supercopa de Espanas and the UEFA Super Cup.
Yet the shoe was on the other foot when his Barcelona career came to an end in 2020. Another unsavoury departure for the Uruguayan but this time he wasn’t the one doing the pushing. Deemed surplus to requirements at Camp Nou, he has repeatedly hit out at his treatment and former manager Ronald Koeman since leaving the club two years ago.
"It was tough because of the way I was disrespected, but I wanted my children to see me leave the club with my head held high," Suarez told Onda Cero last year. "When the time came to tell my children about the move, it was very difficult. They're older now and sensed there was going to be a change.
"There were some very tough moments surrounding my departure from Barcelona. There were rumours that were eventually confirmed and that's what hurt me the most.
"Koeman called me and told me I wasn't in his plans. I accepted the decision, but I told him I had a contract and the club would have to sort it out. I was given the option not to show up for pre-season, but I said that I was still under contract and that I was going to show up.
“Nobody explained it to me properly. I didn't get to speak to Bartomeu. My lawyer took care of that. Seeing how Barcelona are doing does reassure me in some way. I could've stayed put and been paid, but I still believed in my ability. I knew that if I stayed I'd be slated the moment there was a hint of bad form. I needed a change for my pride.”
Signing for Atletico Madrid, he scored 21 goals from 32 appearances to help his new club win La Liga in 2021, finishing seven points clear of third-placed Barcelona. But after failing to reach such heights again last year, he was released at the end of his contract.
Now, 16 years on from taking those first steps towards Camp Nou by leaving Nacional, Suarez’s career has come full circle. On Tuesday night, the forward confirmed he is set to return to his boyhood club, following a campaign from clubs in an effort to convince him to return, having rejected River Plate in favour of trying to stay in Europe earlier this summer.
Speaking in a video message posted on Twitter, the 35-year-old confirmed: "I’ve now reached a pre-agreement in order to join Nacional, it was impossible for me to say no to this opportunity. I hope final details will be resolved soon in order to complete the deal officially.”
In the past, Suarez has spoken of his desire to return to the likes of Ajax or Liverpool, but it is the Uruguayan outfit who have moved to complete such a deal. And, for the first time, the controversial striker won’t be looking to the next transfer or have a clear, burning desire fuelling such a move.
No longer is he longing to follow Sofia to Europe, in an effort to get to Barcelona, or needing to prove he belongs. Nor has he got a point to prove against former employers. Yet what is he without such wild fire in the belly? We are about to find out.
Clubs have suffered scars from Suarez’s career ambitions over, taking the lows with the highs as a questionable price to pay for his genius. Every previous switch had selfish motives, however innocent they were, and he always got his own away. But he never hid away from that. Now, despite such a record, he is heading home as an adored hero.
A flawed hero across Europe, yet in Uruguay an untouchable legend. Liverpool witnessed three years of his greatness on his rise to the top, but as his career slowly nears its end, he has returned to square one. Any chance of Anfield return, if ever in doubt, is now over.
On paper he has had the perfect career. Adored at every club, he has won the biggest honours for the biggest sides and even fired Uruguay to international glory. But scratch beneath the surface and, despite the romantic beginning , it was far from a fairytale. Given the hero's homecoming he is about to receive, it is almost too good to be true.
He left a boy but comes back a man. For so long desperate to get away from Montevideo, he now returns to his homeland as a very different Luis Suarez. You'd imagine this time the Nacional fans won't mistake him for a donkey!
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