Robson de Souza (born January 25, 1984 in São Vicente, São Paulo), nicknamed Robinho, is a Brazilian footballer playing for Spanish La Liga club Real Madrid C.F. and the Brazilian national team.
Robinho was born in Parque Bitaru, a poor neighborhood of São Vicente in Santos, where he began playing football at an early age. When he was six years old, he was signed to the Beira-Mar, a local footballing academy; his team won the championship in his first year.[1] One of his teammates at the time was Marcelo, currently Robinho's teammate at Real Madrid. In 1993, at the age of just nine, Robinho scored 73 goals for the Portuários futsal team. He later joined Santos' youth program, which at the time was overseen by Brazilian football legend Pelé.
Robinho played his first La Liga game on August 28, 2005 in a 2-1 win against Cádiz CF, coming on as a 65th-minute replacement for Thomas Gravesen. He ended up making 37 appearances and scored eight goals in his first season.
At the start of the 2006-07 campaign, Robinho fell out of favour with new manager Fabio Capello, and he spent much of the first few months of the season on the bench. Only after the winter break did Robinho find himself in the starting eleven.
Robinho was given permission by FIFA to skip a Copa América training session with Brazil so he could take part in Madrid's season finale against Mallorca on June 18, 2007, which they won 3-1 and in the process claimed their thirtieth league title, which was also the third of Robinho's career. He contributed eleven goals and fourteen assists for Madrid in the 2007-08 La Liga season.
Robinho earned his first cap for Brazil in the 2003 CONCACAF Gold Cup match on July 13, which Brazil lost 1-0 to Mexico.
He played in four of Brazil's five 2006 World Cup matches as a reserve, going scoreless. However, he was in top form in the 2007 Copa América a year later. For the tournament, he wore the number 11 jersey, the same number his childhood hero Romario wore. Robinho scored all four of Brazil's group stage goals via a hat trick in Brazil's 3-0 group stage match against Chile, and a penalty in a 1-0 win over Ecuador. His last two goals came in a 6-1 quarterfinal thrashing of Chile. Brazil took home the trophy, and Robinho reaped the individual honors, finishing as the Golden Boot winner in addition to being named the best player of the tournament. Robinho has one cap as captain and that was a friendly against Algeria, due to the absence of Lúcio and Gilberto Silva.
On October 18, 2007 Robinho and Ronaldinho were at the center of a controversy when they were both benched for the upcoming weekend by their league clubs after they had missed their flights from Brazil back to Spain. Reports by Brazilian newspaper O Globo described both players partying with other teammates into the early morning hours at popular Rio de Janeiro nightclub Catwalk, as a celebration of Brazil's 5-0 win over Ecuador the day before. The report alleged that Robinho was seen dancing with women and that he had asked a security guard for 40 condoms before leaving the nightclub at 5 a.m. He denied the allegations, adding that he was planning to marry his girlfriend, pregnant with their first child, in early 2008.
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