Pepe: The Unlikely Journey of Football’s Most Feared Defender

• When you think of footballers who send shivers down the spines of opponents, the name Pepe undoubtedly tops the list. But did you know this fierce and formidable defender was once named after two of history’s greatest scientific minds? Yes, this might sound hard to believe, but Pepe—real name Kepler Laveran de Lima Ferreira—is as much a product of scholarly ambition as he is of raw athletic prowess.
  

• Pepe’s name is a tribute to Johannes Kepler, the astronomer who formulated the laws of planetary motion, and Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran, a Nobel Prize-winning physiologist. His parents, avid readers and scholars, envisioned a future for their son in the world of science.
  

“With a name like that, my boy is going to become a scientist,” his father often mused. But as destiny would have it, the science Pepe mastered was that of physics on the football pitch—becoming an immovable object and a force to be reckoned with.