At 22-year-old, Antony has already experienced a lot as a young man, even outside of football.
Growing up in a suburb in Sao Paulo, he was witness to a lot of drug and gun crime, and watched countless families be torn apart by death and destruction. He admitted that a lot of it shocked him, including the time when police once raided his home.
“But I always had strength from my family, a family very devoted to God, who always showed me the right path to follow,” he said when describing how he coped with it all. That faith would have been strengthened when he was recruited by Sao Paulo FC aged 12, moving to their training centre just three years later.
