Slaven Bilic will never forget one conversation he had with a young Joao Pedro as he was starting to make an impact in English football.Bilic had been in charge of Watford for a short time after being given the job in September 2022 but had already seen enough to know the then-21-year-old Brazilian forward had huge potential.“I remember telling him once that he could be the Michael Jordan of the team,” Bilic tells The Athletic. “‘Like Jordan with the Chicago Bulls. This is your team, you have to take more responsibility. It is not enough that you are playing well, you have to make the others play well too’. He embraced that. “I told him, ‘You have to think big, it will be a waste otherwise’. I remember we were in Spain during the 2022 World Cup, preparing for the season to restart (that tournament was played in Qatar in November and December). We went out for a meal, the whole team. Brazil were playing against Serbia when Richarlison scored a great bicycle kick. I turned to Joao and told him, ‘You have a quality to play for Brazil very soon’. He didn’t say, ‘Oh no, no no’. He was like, ‘Yes, yes, yes. That’s my ambition’. I was surprised, in a positive way, how assured, how focused he was.”This is why Joao Pedro leading from the front at Chelsea has not been a shock to Bilic, nor other personnel from his time at Watford, his first English club.As the now 24-year-old prepares for his first FA Cup final at Wembley against Manchester City on Saturday and attempts to help Chelsea win the trophy for the first time since 2018, it is clear from those who knew him back then that he was always destined to play on the biggest stage.Nobody will dispute that Joao Pedro now looks the finished article.His form has been one of the few positives for Chelsea in a difficult debut campaign. With 15 goals, he is the fourth-highest scorer in the Premier League behind Erling Haaland, Igor Thiago and Antoine Semenyo. Unlike those three, none of his strikes have come from the penalty spot.He has broken the 20-goal barrier for all competitions and did so with one of the best goals of 2025-26, a spectacular overhead kick in a 3-1 defeat against Nottingham Forest this month. If Chelsea are to beat City at Wembley on Saturday, you suspect he will be one of the key men.He was named in Brazil’s provisional 55-man World Cup squad this week and, having won eight caps, he is expected to make the final cut for this summer’s tournament in North America.It has been some rise since he first arrived as a raw teenager in England in January 2020, having agreed to join Watford, who were in the Premier League then, from Rio de Janeiro side Fluminense. The deal was put in place when he was still just 16 but, due to transfer regulations, he had to wait until he turned 18 to complete it.Former Tottenham Hotspur and Brazil goalkeeper Heurelho Gomes, who was part of a Watford side struggling to stay in the top flight when Joao Pedro joined, played an important role in him adapting to England.Joao Pedro at Watford in 2022 (Athena Pictures/Getty Images)“He could not speak any English,” Gomes tells The Athletic. “I found a place for him to live, and I used to pick him up at his house to take him to training. I would talk to him on our journeys about football, but also where to buy Brazilian foods and the best Brazilian restaurants. I also helped translate for the coach (Nigel Pearson). I was very close to him. I saw him as a son (Gomes was 39 at the time).“The only issue he had was he wanted to play from the first day. Sometimes the manager would leave him out of the squad (Pearson played the teenager just four times before the end of that pandemic-interrupted first season). That was very hard for him. The club’s idea was to prepare him. He was well-liked but physically, he was light. The club wanted him to build more muscles. English football is very tough physically. But he felt he was ready to play from the first minute.