Mio-Star was once a binman! This defender wants to rattle Kane & Co.

Mio-Star was once a binman! This defender wants to rattle Kane & Co. His year could hardly have gone much better so far. “Only” the World Cup title would probably have been the cherry on top of his career cream cake. After all, after Facundo Medina finished as World Cup runner-up with Argentina at the tournament in the USA, Canada and Mexico, he has now moved to the Bundesliga, joining Bayer Leverkusen for 20 million euros. As a child, the now 27-year-old surely could never have dreamed that he would one day cost that much money. Medina grew up in Villa Fiorito, a poverty-stricken neighborhood in the greater Buenos Aires area. “I was born just eight blocks from Diego’s (Maradona, editor’s note) former house. His presence is everywhere there. Fiorito is a neighborhood that literally breathes football,” the Argentine said during the World Cup. Like his idol, he grew up playing on dirt pitches. To help his family and earn money, he collected cardboard. In an interview with ESPN, he looked back on that time: “I had other jobs. You had to survive in the neighborhood. I had to get a cart and work, like everyone else. I went out collecting cardboard with my uncles and the whole family.” He said it was family work from Monday to Friday. Looking back, he said that he and his family always had something to eat, but they still had to work hard for it: “We would leave around four or five in the afternoon and come back around nine or ten at night.” That he has to work hard for his success was also clear at the start of his professional career. When River Plate released him in 2018, he moved to CA Talleres and made his breakthrough there. Via RC Lens, the defender eventually made the jump to Europe and fully developed into a key player at Olympique Marseille. This summer, he was finally rewarded with a place at the World Cup. During the tournament, he also benefited from Nicolas Tagliafico not being able to start right away in the opening matches and was named in the starting lineup twice in the group stage, among other appearances. Against Austria (2-0), he set up Messi for the opening goal. He was also on the pitch in the final, but had to be substituted after 50 minutes because of injury. He firmly rejected rumors that there had been tensions in the team shortly before the final against Spain. He even spoke plainly to his mother. “I said to her: Are you joining in with this now too!? Stop with that nonsense!” he said in an interview with Ferné con Grego after the final defeat. He said there had never been any explanation for the final loss other than footballing reasons. “I told her, ‘You’re crazy. Why do you think we would do that on purpose? We wanted to win just as much as everyone else. Don’t you think I would have been happy?’ But we lost, and we have to accept that,” he explained. However, the new Bayer signing does not have much time to process the missed title. After signing his contract in Leverkusen, the start of the season awaits next week: first, the Werkself face third-division side Wiesbaden in the DFB-Pokal, before the Bundesliga gets underway just a week later. There, the league’s strikers are likely to quickly feel the presence of the uncompromising defender, because anyone who learned to fight tooth and nail on the streets of Villa Fiorito will not give up an inch in the Rhineland either. This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇩🇪 here.