Luis Suarez: the passion of football reflected in an attitude

Uruguayan player Luis Suarez is in love with soccer. For the past year, he has become the player who has scored goals for passion and not for fame. He is, as soccer fans will say, a striker for love reasons. At his 27 years of age, Suarez has become a professional and talented player that scores goals for personal reasons: love and passion. Coming from a poor class family, Suarez started playing professional soccer so he could travel and live with his girlfriend, who had been living in Spain since she was 13.

Suarez's performance against England this past week clearly demonstrated how he is a man capable of doing things for honorable reasons. In the match, Suarez scored the 2 winning goals that allowed Uruguay to make it to the next round. What's even more impressive is that with only 28 days after a knee operation, he is still back in business. An incredible recovery seen by the fans as a "miracle" and as "bad news" for England's National Team, who is now officially out of the World Cup. Suarez story had made many people fall in love with a player who decided to play the game for the love he had for it.

He is not only on of the feared strikers in the world these days but also the top scoring player in the Premier League this past season with 31 goals and 14 assists. At the age of 15, Suarez received the advice of his wife and mother of his two sons Sofia Balbi of becoming a professional soccer player. When Sofia moved to Barcelona with his parents, Suarez found another reason to become a professional athlete.

Since Suarez belonged to a family with little to no money, the only chance of seeing his girlfriend again was to become a profession athlete and hopefully receive an offer from a European club. Well, his wish became come true when in 2006 he started playing for Dutch team FC Groningen. One year after that, in 2007, Suarez was sold to Dutch team AFC Ajax. It was at this moment of his career that Suarez knew that his dream had become a reality.

Much has changed for this player in the past years. When he was 13 years old, Suarez confesses that he "started to hang out with the wrong people" and to avoid playing the sport that he loved the most, soccer. However, a couple of years later, his life entered a different stage when he moved to Montevideo with his seven brothers. Once there, his parents divorced and Suarez abandoned the game.

This is the time when Wilson Pirez, formal coach at the time of his team Nacional, decided to give Suarez one more chance of staying in the team. It was when his girlfriend Sofia convinced him of playing the sport for living that  he began to change his attitude both in and outside of the field and realize that he had to score goals in order to become the best. Suarez beat the team's scoring record that year after scoring a total of 63 goals in the season.

Suarez then played for 5 more years with his team Nacional, until at the age of 18 he achieved his first goal: playing in Europe. However, immediately after he started playing professional soccer, he achieved his second and most desired objective: living with girlfriend Sofia, first in Holland and then in England where he started playing for Liverpool. Like out of nowhere, Suarez transformed himself into a scoring machine and became in only a couple of years what many soccer players around the world wish for: a professional soccer player in love with the game.