This is an updated version of a piece originally published on July 7.
Moises Caicedo had given his coaches at Independiente del Valle plenty of reasons to get excited over the years.
There had been goals, assists, the kind of last-gasp tackles that make you wonder whether a player has a third lung. Countless little demonstrations of leadership, too, not to mention the haul of international trophies gathered during his time as captain of the youth teams.
Advertisement
This, though? To the untrained eye, it did not look like much. A jump, a cushioned touch on his chest, a run forward into space and a pass. All in the dying minutes of a routine league win against Guayaquil City — a game Caicedo did not even start.
Yet for Miguel Angel Ramirez, Independiente’s manager at the time, that tiny little sequence was an affirmation. Caicedo was just returning from an injury that had threatened to derail Independiente’s whole season. In his absence, the team had been short on his trademark blend of dynamism and skill. Caicedo had just turned 19 but was already essential.
“When he came back, the team just took off again,” says Ramirez. “Against Guayaquil, when he strode forward in that powerful way of his, I thought, ‘This kid is everything’. I knew he would not be there with us for long.”
That sentiment may sound familiar to Brighton fans and while losing one of your best players is rarely enjoyable, there is some solace to be taken from Caicedo’s exit, with Chelsea paying a British record £115million for him.
This is a player who, by common consensus, was always going to find his way to the very top, and the pace of his ascent has not stopped it from feeling inevitable to those who have had a front-row seat.
“It really hasn’t surprised me,” says Javier Torrente, who coached Caicedo during his loan spell at Beerschot in Belgium. “Anyone who has worked with him, seen his potential, expects him to shine wherever he goes.”
Ramirez, who knows Caicedo better than most having worked with him at both youth and senior level, is even more emphatic.
“He was made for one of the big clubs, made for the biggest competitions,” he says. “I always told him he could go as far as he wanted.”
Caicedo was born in a run-down corner of Santo Domingo, Ecuador’s fourth-largest city by population. Family life was loving but not without hardship. His father owned a rickshaw; his mother sometimes washed clothes for a little extra cash.
Moises was the youngest of 10 siblings. He began his footballing journey on the dusty, scrubland pitches of his hometown where goals were marked out by piles of stones. His older brothers did not take any prisoners. “I learnt how to play hard,” Caicedo said in an interview in 2018.
Advertisement
One morning, when Caicedo was busy smacking a ball against a wall next to his house, he caught the eye of a local football coach called Ivan Guerra. “There was just something about the way he was striking it, using both feet, that stood out,” Guerra later said. He asked Caicedo to join his team, named after Ecuadorian top-flight side Barcelona.
Guerra became an unofficial godfather to Caicedo. He bought him football boots, paid for his bus fares and helped the family out when they couldn’t afford food.
“He was the only one who believed in me,” Caicedo once explained in a radio interview. “He discovered me and he helped me in every way.”
When the team started playing matches around the state, Guerra took on taxi duties — and even acted as Caicedo’s alarm clock.
“He was a sleepyhead,” Guerra told Ecuadorian newspaper El Comercio. “Sometimes I went to wake him up at 6am and he didn’t want to go. I would tell him, ‘The bus is already here, we’re going to play in Esmeraldas or some other province’. He was always the last on the bus.”
Caicedo played up front initially, but soon found his place in midfield. “He was so calm, so serene,” said Guerra. “I knew he was going to be good.”
The secret soon got out. By the age of 13, Caicedo was playing for a regional select XI and had joined the youth ranks at Espoli, a professional team linked to a police academy in Quito. Two years later, after a trial set up by one of his brothers, he joined Independiente.
Santo Domingo was never going to contain him for long, but Caicedo has not forgotten his roots. He took part in a neighbourhood tournament just a few days after starring at last year’s World Cup — the video of him scoring a goal in the final went viral in Ecuador — and, thanks to his generosity, Guerra’s young charges all have snazzy, matching kit. The project has a new name, too: the Moises Caicedo Football School.
When Ramirez took over as the director of Independiente’s academy, in mid-2018, Caicedo was injured. He had ruptured cruciate ligaments in his knee the previous year; the road back had not been smooth.
“They had to operate more than once,” Ramirez tells The Athletic. “They went back in and opened up the knee to repair damage from the first surgery.”
Advertisement
All told, Caicedo was out of action for 10 months. It was, understandably, a testing time.
“Sometimes I cried,” he said in a subsequent radio interview. “Nobody knew. I would go to my room and just start crying out of frustration, out of sadness. It was very hard, but I didn’t stop believing. I trusted in God and prayed a lot.”
In a way, Caicedo was fortunate. By the standards of Ecuadorian football, Independiente have top-rate facilities. The academy, rebuilt to exacting standards after property magnate Michel Deller bought the club in 2007, is the envy of most of South America. When Caicedo returned, he was assigned a personalised training regimen and a nutrition plan designed to get him back to his best.
It worked. When youth coach Yuri Solano arrived to manage the under-18 side at the start of 2019, he was bowled over by Caicedo’s physicality.
“It was his athleticism that set him apart from the rest at that time,” Solano tells The Athletic. “He had great endurance, strength, speed and agility. He was well ahead of his age group in physical terms.”
Ramirez echoes that view. “He could run non-stop and he got around the field really well,” he says. “He won his individual battles. We called him the Octopus because he had the legs to win the ball wherever it went on the pitch. He was very impressive.”
That year, Independiente played in an invitational youth tournament in Spain and won the Copa Mitad del Mundo, an under-18 competition for South American clubs. Caicedo, the captain of the side, impressed at both.
“He read the game very well and was always involved,” says Solano. “He had an aggressive attitude, both on and off the ball, and he transmitted that energy to others.”
Caicedo was also ambitious. Solano recalls a team-building exercise in which the youngsters were asked to visualise where they would be in three years’ time. It was meant to be a bit of fun. Caicedo replied, with utmost seriousness, that he saw himself playing for Manchester United.
Caicedo moved up to Independiente’s first team after the Copa Mitad del Mundo, making his debut at 17. Ramirez had taken over as manager by that stage, but loyalty was not a factor.
“From the first day he trained with us, he was the best player in the squad,” says Ramirez with a smile. “He took the transition in his stride, both physically and technically. He controlled the ball and kept it moving — and he didn’t make mistakes. He didn’t need any time to adapt.”
Advertisement
By the start of 2020, he was important enough that Ramirez flew him back from the Under-20 Copa Libertadores in Paraguay just to play in a league game against local rivals LDU. Independiente won 3-2; Caicedo hopped on a plane back to Paraguay the following day and helped the under-20s become champions of South America, shining in the final against a River Plate side that featured Enzo Fernandez.
“Moises played a very important role for us,” says Solano. “With him in midfield, we could be quite aggressive in attack while also maintaining a very solid defensive balance. That tournament was a yardstick. It showed his true level.”
Caicedo occasionally played at centre-back for Solano, but his favoured position was just in front of the defence — a South American No 5. That was where Ramirez planned to use him, too. “We thought he had the tactical intelligence and technical skill to do very well there,” he says. “His short passing was good. So was his first touch, his control.”
But the man Ramirez expected him to replace — Cristian Pellerano, an experienced Argentine who is still playing for Independiente now — proved undroppable. Instead, Caicedo was deployed slightly further forward, as a roving No 8.
“Defensively, he had the energy to press high, forcing the opponent into mistakes,” explains Ramirez. “In attack, he could play the final pass and shoot. We also benefited from his knack for arriving in the box at the right time.”
Case in point: his goal in the 5-0 defenestration of Flamengo, a result that sent shockwaves around the continent. After a swift counter-attack, Caicedo appeared on the edge of the area, produced an extravagant dummy that hypnotised four defenders, then prodded the ball into the corner of the net.
“He started to see that he could do well in that role,” says Ramirez. “He enjoyed scoring and playing the final pass. He realised that playing between the lines suited him.”
Advertisement
There were, at that stage, still a few creases in his game that needed ironing out. Principal among them was his passing over longer distances. “He wasn’t the best at that,” says Ramirez. “He didn’t have the right technique for playing those balls into space.”
Ramirez asked Pellerano to help him out. He would stay on after training with Caicedo, showing him how to balance precision and power. After a while, Caicedo’s looping, hopeful long balls became something altogether more effective.
By the end of 2020, Caicedo was playing — and scoring — for Ecuador’s national team. He was, at 19, the best player in the country; his performances in the Libertadores had made him one of South America’s most talked-about young talents. Scouts were lining up to watch him play. Stardom beckoned.
Not that you would have known it if you had bumped into him in the street. Caicedo was low-key and almost comically quiet.
“He was still just a little kid,” says Ramirez, fondly. “He was a humble, sensitive boy; very close to his family. He always wanted to be around them. Whenever there was any type of difficulty, he would cry. He expressed his emotions as every child does.”
When it came to game time, though, it was a different story. “On the pitch, he was a man,” says Ramirez. “He was mature, intelligent and emotionally balanced; he didn’t have those big ups and downs. When the whistle blew, he was like a veteran.”
The recent chapters of Caicedo’s story are more familiar. Brighton won the race for his signature in early 2021; two and a half years on, he is set to be a record-breaking player.
There was, though, one little detour to navigate en route. After seven months with Brighton’s under-23 side — he played one League Cup match for the first team — Caicedo was sent out on loan to Beerschot in the Belgian top flight. Briefly, his confidence took a dip.
Advertisement
“It was clear that he had great potential, but the boy was a little bit down, both in terms of his morale and his physical condition,” recalls Torrente, his manager at Beerschot.
“He definitely felt sad. He hadn’t played much during the previous few months and was not in a good rhythm. We saw him do interesting things in training, but when it came to his first match, he was off the pace.”
There was no magic solution — just patience and hard graft. Caicedo worked on his fitness, realising that the intensity of European football — even in Belgium — was significantly higher than what he had been used to in Ecuador. After a few weeks, the results began to show.
“Every time he touched the ball, he showed that he was a special player,” says Torrente. “He always imposed himself on the game, winning the ball when it was there to be won. And when he had possession, he didn’t lose it easily. You don’t see that combination in many players. He was on a different level.”
Brighton clearly shared that assessment, recalling him early in January 2022 and introducing him to the Premier League, where he has excelled. For Torrente, there were mixed feelings; without Caicedo in the side, he knew Beerschot’s flirtation with the relegation zone was likely to become terminal.
He would be fired four weeks after the midfielder’s exit. Beerschot went down to the second flight at the end of the season.
“I was very happy for him, but disappointed to lose him,” says Torrente. “It worked against me because at that time we still had a chance to escape relegation. But only with Caicedo, not without him.”
There is a pleasing circularity in the idea of Caicedo acting as a long-term replacement for N’Golo Kante — a player he idolised during his adolescence.
“He covers the whole pitch, which I like,” Caicedo said in an interview, aged 16. “He’s also calm: he prefers to focus on his own game rather than get into arguments.”
Advertisement
Those who know Caicedo are backing him to shine — and to make light of that lofty price tag.
“Nothing shocks me with him,” says Torrente. “I wasn’t surprised when he went back to England. I wasn’t surprised that he broke into Brighton’s starting line-up quickly, and I wasn’t surprised by the level he showed in the second half of last year.”
Ramirez, who is still in touch with Caicedo, echoes that view. “He definitely has the potential to play at the very top level,” he concludes. “He can be one of the best in the world in his position.”
