Internacional U17

Long before he was lifting the Champions League with Liverpool, Alisson Becker kept goal in the same red shirt as the boys who now play for Internacional's Sub-17 side, working his way up through the club's own youth academy. Alexandre Pato went the other direction fast, leaving for Milan while barely out of his teens.

The Sub-17 side is not a club of its own. It sits inside Sport Club Internacional's structure, trained through the Escola do Inter on the grounds of the Estádio Beira-Rio in Porto Alegre — officially the Estádio José Pinheiro Borda, seating 50,842 and home to the first team, nicknamed Colorado, in red shirts with white shorts and socks. The parent club, founded on 4 April 1909, built its name as "Celeiro de ases," the cradle of aces, less on silverware than on the players it kept sending out: Fred went on to Manchester United, Sandro and Rafael Sobis both won the Copa Libertadores with the seniors in 2010, and Juan Jesus did the same. Nilmar, the club's all-time top scorer, won the World Cup with the Brazil national team in 2002.

None of that changes what the Sub-17 team plays for on its own terms: the Brasileiro Sub-17. There it meets the same clubs that dominate Brazilian football at senior level — Flamengo, Corinthians, Palmeiras among them — each running its own academy, each treating the competition less as a youth fixture than as a pipeline into the first team.