Mário Jardel (48) has told in detail about his lingering cocaine addiction. The two-time winner of the Golden Shoe does in the Brazilian reality show Big Brother Famosos, based on the Dutch Big Brother, his story of the drug addiction he’s been battling for at least the past twenty years. For example, the former top scorer indicates that in 2002, the year in which he beat Thierry Henry and David Trezeguet in the battle for the Soulier d’Or, stayed awake for seven days after a cocaine overdose.
It was no secret that Jardel struggled with addiction issues during and after his impressive career. In June 2019, the Brazilian revealed during an interview on the Youtube channel Pilhados although the urge to use cocaine played tricks on him during his active career. “I entered that world out of curiosity when I played in Europe. They offered it to me and I started consuming it regularly when I was on vacation because I had anti-doping controls around the games. It’s one of the problems of football. You have a lot of money and there are a lot of temptations, friendships, and things that spark curiosity,” Jardel said more than two and a half years ago.
In early January of the current calendar year, Jardel announced his participation in the Brazilian reality show. During one of the first broadcasts, the former striker revealed more details about his long battle with addiction. Even during his active career, Jardel could not resist the temptation, and the addiction sometimes led to life-threatening situations. Remarkable was, among other things, the fact that he had administered an overdose of cocaine, nota bene in the year in which he conquered the Golden Shoe as a player of Sporting Portugal. “In December 2002, I overdosed on cocaine and stayed awake for seven days.”
“For everyone who sees me now: this is definitely not a good example,” Jardel says candidly. “I ordered women, I stuck in life thinking that nothing would happen to me; that everything was fine. I am now very aware of this problem that I have, of my daily struggle. What matters is that I’m alive and I’m now saying ‘no’ to drugs,” said Jardel, who says he is now clean and acknowledges that his current wife saved him from destruction. “She was always by my side. When I went to party, she came with me because otherwise the temptation would be too great. Now I want to pass on standards and values to my children and make sure that young people don’t make the mistakes I made.”
Super Mario made the switch from Vasco da Gama to FC Porto in the summer of 1996 for an amount of approximately four million euros. The first season in the shirt of os Dragões immediately became a huge success, as he became the top scorer in the Primeira Liga with thirty goals. Two years later, the striker even scored 36 goals in the Portuguese league, winning the Golden Boot. Jardel was well ahead of Rául González (25 goals on behalf of Real Madrid) and Ruud van Nistelrooij (31 goals on behalf of PSV) in the 1998/99 season. After an adventure with Galatasaray, which took him over in July 2000 for an amount of seventeen million euros, he ended up at Sporting Portugal in the summer of 2001.
Jardel again achieved great success in Lisbon and managed to seize the Golden Shoe for the second time in the 2001/02 season. Employed by os Leões the goal-getter was accurate no fewer than 42 times in only 30 competition matches. Thanks to the unique performance, he stayed ahead of the likes of Henry (Arsenal) and Trezeguet (Juventus), both 24 goals, in the battle for the Golden Boot. After that, however, things quickly went downhill for the striker, partly due to the lack of fitness, various injuries and, as it turned out, severe addiction problems.
Before Jardel officially ended his career in 2012, he played through no fewer than eleven clubs. However, he would never touch the pre-2002 level again. Partly because of the fierce competition in the striker position of the Brazilian national team, Jardel came to only ten international matches, in which he scored once. Despite his successful season in Portugal, the attacker was not included in Brazil’s 2002 World Cup squad in South Korea and Japan, where the country became world champions by beating Germany 2-0. Various Brazilian media suspect that the choice of coach Luis Felipe Scolari to pass Jardel has had a major negative impact on the remainder of the striker’s career.