Eduardo Camavinga: ‘People think Madrid are dead, but Madrid are never, never dead.’

“My dad told me I was the one who was going to lift the family up,” Eduardo Camavinga says. He was 11 then; he is 20 now and he is smiling. He is always smiling.

He was in the fifth year at school and can picture the fire engines going past. Born in a refugee camp in Miconge, Angola, to Congolese parents, the third of six children, he was a toddler when they moved to France: first Lille, then Fougères, a pretty little town of 20,000 in Brittany where they made a home. That day, it burned down. They had been in it a year.

They live in Madrid now and he is looking for the word: in French first, then English, which he speaks with Antonio Rüdiger and occasionally helps out here, then Spanish. At least he hopes it’s Spanish. “Orgulloso? That is it, isn’t it? Or is that Portuguese? Proud? They’re proud of me.”

That smile again. “I’m happy my family are happy,” he says.

The youngest footballer to play for Rennes, at 16 years four months, the youngest to make his debut for France since the second world war, aged 17. He joined Madrid at 18 and was a European champion at 19. “I live life as it happens,” he says. “I’ll think about where I came from years from now.”

Through patio doors, the sun shines on the pitch at Valdebebas. In the distance, four giant towers built on Madrid’s old training ground look over the city. On the shelves are photos, medals, old boots, shirts, tickets, ID cards: Alfredo Di Stéfano, Ferenc Puskas, Zinedine Zidane. There are posters from the club’s 14 European Cups, even a giant, elaborately embroidered sombrero with Carlo Ancelotti’s name stitched in gold thread.

“I’m not going to say it’s normal, but I’m here,” Camavinga says. “I wouldn’t say it’s normal to win the Champions League, but I just enjoyed