FEde Valverde is enjoying one of the best moments of his career. Captain of both Real Madrid and Uruguay, everything is going his way in 2026. While his wife Mina Bonino is pregnant with their third child, he unleashes chaos in his best years in white with a new dimension with Arbeloa…and the confidence with which he was able to fully open up in an unmissable chat on the podcast “Telapia Picante”.
I thought: Where am I falling into this? I could see the brand on my clothes, so I quickly took them off so people wouldn’t know I wasn’t wearing branded clothes.
“I was moving around everywhere. One of my coaches called me a little bird. My father didn’t like it, but he didn’t notice. Now I’m a hawk, because I’m a little more aggressive, but I’m still a little bird,” the Uruguayan player said of his still-used nickname. Then Madrid came, and he could not refuse the offer, and in Castilla he already felt some kind of mismatch. “I was so embarrassed and it almost killed me. I thought, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here.'” When I got to the parking lot, I realized that my teammates from Castilla had very good cars, and I had very few good cars, and yet I was already playing in the Primera División for Peñarol. And I started thinking like this. “Where am I going to fit in? When I entered the dressing room, I started seeing very expensive branded clothes, and I didn’t want to take them off, or I took them off right away to avoid being seen. It was a reality check,” he explains of his sudden immersion into a world of privilege as opposed to reality.
Everything was different on the pitch in Valdebebas. There, the enormous power of his shots caused multiple scares. “I injured some goalkeepers. I injured Luca Zidane’s shoulder. I wanted to die, I thought I was going to be kicked out, I injured Zidane’s son. Several goalkeepers were injured by my shots, mostly dislocated shoulders. My legs are so thin that I don’t know where I get so much power from,” he says with a laugh.
The 17-year-old’s video goes viral
A while ago, a video of a 17-year-old Uruguayan player who played for Club Atlético Peñarol went viral. In this video, his voice in a short interview immediately after the match was so striking that social media users started making jokes and comparisons, commenting that he resembled Mickey Mouse’s voice. “Oh yeah, that was amazing. Like those three goals, I’ll never forget,” he said.
We thought it was something to do with adolescence and would change, but it never did.
“I already had problems with my voice. When I spoke, I had problems with my throat, and they always advised me to undergo surgery.” The Uruguayan commented that he visited various specialists, but every specialist told him that he had to operate, but that due to financial circumstances at the time they could not solve the problem. “We were a poor family and we didn’t have money for surgeries from one day to the next. It’s like adolescence and we thought it would change someday, but it never did. I don’t know when it changed, but it didn’t change there. It does now, thank God, but it suffered at the time,” he said. He explained.
I lost my mind, but I did what I had to do…sometimes you just need a lift
Valverde also admitted that the video revelations affected him at the time, saying, “From that day on, people suffered because they didn’t know what was behind them. At the end of the day, that’s what matters. It’s funny and I laugh now, but at that moment… “For many years, I couldn’t encourage myself to talk in groups with people I didn’t know because I knew I had that limitation. I was very embarrassed because I had that defect.”
Morata’s entrance
But his game, his combination of grit and football, sometimes crosses the line of norms. His tackle on Alvaro Morata in the Super Cup derby is etched in many people’s memories. It was a necessary foul on Madrid’s side, but not so much on their opponents. “That’s not the image for the kids, but at that moment I felt that I had to play for the team. I knew I was going to be sent off. I just thought that Real Madrid must win. I’m South American and we’re hot-blooded. Sometimes you want to lift him up,” he explained without hesitation.
