Outside Football
He is a patron of The Street League, a UK based charity which organises football matches for homeless people, refugees and asylum seekers. In June 2003, Gilberto travelled to Brazil on tour with 17 Street League players. The tour included a visit to his home town Lagoa da Prata and games against local shanty town teams at the Maracanã stadium.
Gilberto is a keen musician. In his spare time, he plays the mandolin and the guitar. When he first moved to England he took up mandolin lessons and played publicly at his local pub in St Albans. He later started learning the guitar instead. Like many Brazilian footballers he plays samba music with his teammates in the Seleção (the Brazilian national team) when they are relaxing in between international matches.
He has a Giant Anteater named after him at London Zoo. Gilberto is an adoptee of the animal, which he received from a London Zoo competition winner. The footballer described the South American animal as "my slightly more hairy brother!"
Read more about this topic: Gilberto Silva
Famous quotes containing the word football:
“...I’m not money hungry.... People who are rich want to be richer, but what’s the difference? You can’t take it with you. The toys get different, that’s all. The rich guys buy a football team, the poor guys buy a football. It’s all relative.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)
“In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty’s torch. In football you run over somebody’s face.”
—Donald Hall (b. 1928)