At the start of 2022, Thiago told his agents it was time to move elsewhere.<\/p>\n
Bulgarian champions Ludogorets, who had tried to sign him the season before, returned with another offer and secured a deal.<\/p>\n
“In football, a lot of people try to define paths and limits for others. You often see a player going through a difficult period and being labelled as a certain type of player and that label becomes a kind of ceiling. I fight strongly against that,” former Ludogorets assistant coach Rafael Ferreira, currently at Atromitos in Greece, said.<\/p>\n
“I believe everyone has room to grow as long as they’re in an environment that allows it. And Igor Thiago fits into a very interesting profile because he has a very strong mentality.<\/p>\n
“In his early period, he didn’t get many minutes. And what does he do? He asks to play for the second team. He wants to play. That shows you his mentality – not sulking because he isn’t playing but looking for alternatives. When you work with that type of player, we usually say the sky’s the limit.”<\/p>\n
Thiago’s mentality also stands out with his team-mates.<\/p>\n
“What I really liked about him was that when he arrived, he was always asking the older players what they thought he could improve. That’s what I found different about him, special even,” says Cauly, a former Ludogorets midfielder who now plays for Bahia in Brazil.<\/p>\n
“He already had that worker’s mentality, that desire to keep improving. And a player with his physical attributes… we already knew that, one way or another, it had to work out for him as a striker.”<\/p>\n
It was no surprise that, following only one full season and 20 goals later, he was on his way to Club Brugge in Belgium.<\/p>\n
“Sometimes he’d get, I don’t know, five or 10 minutes in a game, come on and score. It was like he had something about him… as if his energy attracted good things,” Ferreira added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the start of 2022, Thiago told his agents it was time to move elsewhere. Bulgarian champions Ludogorets,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":246432,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":{"0":"post-246431","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246431\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/246432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}