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It is a very old-fashioned route to the top, yet also a very modern one. A few years before joining the Premier League champions, Savinho was getting up at 5am to milk his grandparents’ cows on the family farm in Brazil. Manchester City was not on his mind then, he admitted. “I was really happy being on the farm,” he said, sounding like a throwback to the times when footballers had been miners and millworkers, trained in trades or primed to take over family businesses.
