LEXIS Sanchez will miss his mid-winter break this season last year he used it to go home to Tocopilla in northern Chile and inaugurate five new synthetic grass football pitches he had donated to the desert town where he grew up.
‘This is where I used to play, although not quite in these conditions. It was more a case of rocks for goalposts when I was young,’ Sanchez told the crowds who had gathered to catch a glimpse of him last year.
The donation has made a difference with a youth football league established and more young boys than ever playing the game despite baseball being Tocopilla’s No 1 sport.
His mother Martina sees every match with friends in the same house where she brought up her son and his four older brothers.
She rejected the chance to move house, but has allowed her son to pay for the home’s extensive renovation, and now she no longer needs to sell fish in the market to scrape a living a job that once inadvertently gave Sanchez a major career leg-up.
While her son was a 16-year-old playing for the Cobreloa first team in the Copa Libertadores, but still on youth-team wages, she was fined for selling fish without a licence.
Local journalist Mauricio Riquelme says: ‘There was no way the family could pay the $1,000 fine and so Sanchez was put in touch with the agent Fernando Felicevich who bought his registration and settled the debt.’
Felicevich moved the youngster to Udinese in Italy a year later, giving him the big break to Europe that he thought would never come.
It should not be a surprise he has already shown himself capable of carrying Arsenal on his shoulders this season.
They are made tough in Tocopilla where the copper mine, the power plant, and the docks are the limited career options on the contaminated horizon the air is thick with industrial pollution and the region has abnormally high cancer mortality rates linked to levels of arsenic used in the mining.
Under the guidance of Felicevich, and with loan spells back in Chile with Colo-Colo and at River Plate, Sanchez made the Udinese first team before his €25million switch to Barcelona in 2011.
He appeared for Chile at Wembley against England in November 2013, scoring both goals in a 2-0 win
That move to Barcelona fulfilled the dream of Sanchez’s doting step-father Jose Delaigue who by this time had contracted cancer. Sanchez paid for his care and treatment up until his death.
