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“Sometimes I can be in the street in London and be an idol, and sometimes I can be a fan,” David Luiz explains to me while looking across the room at the beautiful people who mill behind us, themselves looking up at a super-size portrait of him taken by celebrity photographer Danny Clinch and illustrated by Brazilian street artist Ricardo AKN.
Outside their world of matches and press conferences and tracksuited disembarkations from team coaches, footballers can look awkward. Not Luiz. Had there not been a huge portrait of the Chelsea and Brazil defender towering over the Bloomsbury Ballrooms last night, 6ft 2in Luiz would have melted in among the crowd invited by Pepsi to gaze at its “Art of Football” exhibit. Recently voted sexiest footballer alive by a women’s magazine, he’s a better aesthetic fit with this mélange of Jack Whitehall, models and socialites than he is with the likes of Chelsea teammates John Terry and Ashley Cole.
Luiz is the closest thing football has to Cara Delevingne (at last month’s NBA game at the O2 Arena in ungainly basketball shirts, the pair were posing pictures, tongues sticking out) — a maverick, prodigious 26-year-old, loved by west London’s most attractive women clubbers and some of its balding football fans in equal measure. “I have a girlfriend so I decide already who I want,” says Luiz, when I ask about the female attention he gets in his favourite drinking holes. The girlfriend of whom he speaks is Portuguese student Sara Madeira, 23.
'The Art of Football' - stars of the game and the artists behind the images
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On the pitch Luiz is a cultured player who punctuates great performances with horrific concentration lapses. He played his first game for Chelsea three years ago this year and earns a reported £75,000 a week, or £3.9 million a year. And he could end the summer as one of the biggest stars on the planet if his native Brazil — for whom he is vice-captain and has won 33 caps — triumph in the World Cup on home soil, as many expect.
Known to be a devout Christian, Luiz says he likes to spend nights in at his penthouse on the Thames by Putney Bridge and at local Brazilian steakhouse Rodizio Preto. But he’s also known to regulars at Novikov, Zuma and Nobu as a gregarious guest, once cutting up his birthday cake and delivering slices to surprised strangers dining around him.
When I tell him a friend of mine saw him ignoring a club bouncer to high-five fans in a West End club last month, he smiles.
“When I go to a club, some clubs put some bodyguards but I will always try to speak with everyone because that’s like a respect,” he says in the kind of endearing English spoken by his manager Jose Mourinho. “One day I dreamed to be famous and to play football. Now I have this opportunity so I try to give them my love and to them be a normal person.”
In any battle to fend off suitors such as Barcelona or Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea might find the Brazilian’s love affair with London might help them. “It is a gift from God to live in one of the best cities in the world,” he says — before disappearing among the beautiful people.