^{Rafael wears Bottega Veneta for VERSUS.}

Alongside talent, hard work, ambition and luck, fearlessness plays an important role in determining the success of an athlete. The ability to ignore expectations - to focus solely on the game - is a rare and critical skill that only becomes more useful the higher up the world of sport an athlete climbs. It’s a subject the greatest sportspeople of our time love to eulogise about. In fact, our image of a ‘fearless athlete’ comes in the Kobe Bryant / Michael Jordan mould: unfeeling, unflinching and almost robotic. It’s a mindset championed by grindset entrepreneurs and Instagram ballers the world over: to succeed you need to be cold, harsh and clinical. Nothing matters but the grind, this is what fearlessness looks like. Or is it?

When you watch Rafael Leão play for the first time, it’s hard to imagine him feeling any fear at all. The way he gallops beaming around the San Siro - twisting and laughing around helpless defenders - is nothing but joyous. When he scores, which is often, he’s bashful and giddy, giggling with his teammates like he’s back on the playground in Almada. Rafael Leão is undoubtedly fearless. His, though, is a bravery based in peace. He’s not afraid because he doesn’t have to be. He believes the next chance will come and the chance after that. It’s an attitude that allows for self-expression and one that has served him well both on and off the pitch.

An aura of calm is tangible when AC Milan’s No.10 arrives at our set after an afternoon training back in December. He moves languidly, padding slowly around the room to introduce himself to the crew. A Portuguese who has spent time in France and now Italy, Rafa (as his friends call him) switches quickly between languages on his rounds before settling into a comfortable Lustinanian back and forth with his entourage. The 2022 Serie A Player of the Year is having a decent season - collecting a goal or an assist every other game before picking up a hamstring injury against Lecce in late November. Today, VERSUS is sitting down to explore not just Rafael’s sporting prowess but the new type of player he represents off the pitch.

“I’m not afraid”, he says, shaking his head, “I think I have the personality for it… and the image.”

Of the latter, certainly, there’s no doubt. On set, Leão is poised and smooth. Footballers have a reputation for a certain woodenness in front of the camera but the 24 year old doesn’t appear to have gotten the memo. He drifts comfortably between setups, feeling out the Bottega collection on offer as he goes. The clothes hang off his broad frame as they should, and it’s not hard to imagine Leão at the point he aspires to be at:

“I just want to do campaigns with the biggest brands”, he laughs, “Gucci, Prada, Bottega - that sort of thing. I think it's on the way.”

It’s a self-confidence that comes in the face of underlying murmurs of discontent from football’s traditionalists. Despite the seemingly unstoppable overlap of football and fashion’s Venn diagram, there are many within the game who mistrust this new frontier. “Athletes are athletes”, they say, “footballers should stick to football”. Any extra-curricular activity, especially one so frivolous and shallow as fashion, is simply a distraction from the sport they’re employed to play. Leão, predictably, disagrees.

“When you get off the pitch, you're a normal person and a normal person can do anything. Of course, football is your first job and you need to give 100% but you are able to do other stuff as well. I think 90% of football players want to try other things but they are sometimes afraid of what people will say.”

Leão is, very firmly, in the brave minority. It’s clear he doesn’t care about what he is “supposed” to be doing. In 2021, he began releasing music under the alias WAY 45, a name in reference to his postcode growing up. What started as a lockdown hobby became a legitimate side hustle, offering mental time away from the cauldron of elite level football. He’s not unique in the desire for variety, either:

“I know at least two or three players that have made music and haven't put it out because they are not sure about how it sounds.”

Leão suffers from no such apprehensions. With two full albums released during the most successful period of his on-field career to date, it’s clear this “distraction” is anything but.

As the Milanese superstar makes his way around set for a final time, signing shirts and taking selfies with the crew, the thing I’m struck most by is the calm he exudes. He’s a young man, both in football and in life, but has the self-assuredness of someone much older. It’s an inner belief that allows him to move elegantly through whichever world he chooses. He doesn’t need to worry. He doesn’t need to be fearful. He’s Rafael Leão.

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Photography: Elliot Hensford‍

Photography Assistant: Fin Gleeson

Directed by: TJ Sawyerr

Lighting/Digi: Barney Arthur

Styling: Aurelie Mason-Perez

Set Design: Skye Halsey

Set Design Assistant: Leone Marigo

Creative Direction: Morgan Allan, Elliot Hensford

Creative Production: TJ Sawyerr

Production: Amie Cripps

Retouching: Jenny Arrowsmith

The Gen-Z football superstar is multifaceted. They are hyper talented on the field, of course. Erling Haaland, Jude Bellingham, Linda Caicedo and Jamal Musiala spend most of their time breaking new records and new ground for young ballers on the pitch. What’s different about this generation of players is that they live full, well-rounded, varied lives away from football as well. Socials have allowed them to gain and control their own following away from the red tape of PR and sponsorship deals, helping them to pursue their own interests on their own terms. James Maddison puts on golf tournaments, Kai Havertz runs a donkey charity and Fulham’s Tosin Adarabioyo spends his spare time opening packs of trading cards on live streams. It’s an autonomy outside of football that hasn’t been present in the game since before Wenger’s professionalism revolution. Young players have opened their eyes to new worlds and new possibilities. Leão, being the fearless type, has set his sights on conquering one of the biggest prizes of all: the world of fashion.

Though an ambitious goal, it feels like a natural one for the 24 year old. An understanding of style was embedded in him from an early age.

“My father is fashionable.”, he told me a couple weeks later over Zoom. “He likes to wear suits - he was one of the first people to inspire me to dress well and to check everything before leaving the house.”

Breaking into the fashion industry is easier said than done, though. It’s a competitive world, even for someone of Leão’s position and resources. He doesn’t seem worried. “It depends on the personality”, he says confidently, “I'm pretty quiet but I want to get into that world so I need to search for people who can help me achieve and express myself at the highest level”.

Many lines have been written about the ongoing convergence of fashion and football but it is worth doing a quick status check. In the past half decade, the fashion world’s powers have unashamedly embraced the sartorial potential of the beautiful game. Football shirts have gone from embarrassing pub fodder and festival-wear to an immovable fixture of every inter-brand capsule collection. Kim Kardashian, Timothée Chalamet and Kendall Jenner regularly send football nerd ‘Twitter’ into meltdown by stepping out in increasingly rare and obscure jerseys. Shirts aside, the aesthetic of football - the visual history of the sport - has become a regular touchpoint for the largest brands and most esteemed fashion houses in the world. Runways from Paris to New York are peppered with scarves, shorts, socks and trainers that wouldn’t look out of place on a League One terrace or in a five-a-side changing room. There’s been a cultural goldrush on club-brand collaborations, resulting in a tidal wave of hastily assembled “lifestyle collections” that squeeze square nuggets of club history into round holed fashion campaigns. Individual players are being swept up as ambassadors for brands from Boohoo Man to Gucci. For the first time in almost 20 years, footballers not named ‘David Beckham’, feature on the covers of the nation’s greatest culture titles. This manic, embryonic, unregulated environment is where Leão is determined to plant his flag. Is he daunted at all by what lies in front of him? Of course not.