NIZHNY NOVGOROD, Russia: It was mid-2006 when scouts for Dutch club Groningen travelled to Uruguay to check out a promising young striker called Elias Figueroa. Instead, they witnessed another teenage forward play like a man possessed and score a wonder goal. Groningen signed him up on an impulse and flew him to Europe. The name? Luis Suarez. While those roots may be little known, including an impoverished upbringing and yearning for a girlfriend who moved to Spain, from there the Suarez story is familiar. His relentless goal-scoring took him quickly to Ajax, then Liverpool, and now Barcelona, while along the way he also became Uruguay’s all-time top scorer. Yet the same explosive style and win-at-all-costs character that turned him into one of the world’s elite strikers also made Suarez notorious for the wrong reasons. Most infamously, he was sent home in shame from the 2014 World Cup in Brazil for biting an Italian defender – something he had done before in a seemingly impossible-to-control, bizarre impulse linked to his desperation to succeed. Four years earlier, Suarez deliberately handled a goal-line header against Ghana – then further offended against sportsmanship by wildly celebrating the ensuing penalty miss – to deny them what… Read full this story
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