LONG READ 'I was in the shadows, there was nothing for me': Kaleem Barreto's two-year odyssey of turmoil, hamstring grafts and unemployment

Kaleem Barreto has been lonely. He’s felt anger, isolation, despair, fantasy, euphoria and anxiety. Sometimes they’ve all hit him in a single day. At other points he felt nothing at all, the crushing numbness of his situation descending like a black cloak.

It has been almost exactly two years since Barreto last played a competitive game of rugby, and more than 18 months since he was piggybacked from the training field by a GB Sevens teammate with only one functioning Achilles tendon. He endured two operations and waited 400 days before being able to run again, during which time the GB programme shrivelled, rendering Barreto unemployed as well as immobile.

Mentally, he has seen so many mirages on the road to recovery only for the unjust reality to slap him in the face. Physically, he has still to regain some feeling in his left calf. It has been so long since he took the field he struggles to remember how his body felt bounding around pitches on the HSBC SVNS.

And yet, here Barreto is, in a meeting room at Scottish Rugby’s Oriam base, about to head to the airport, board a flight to the Valladolid SVNS and end this wretched purgatory. How has he coped with it all? “By hoping you get back to this point. I was likely delusional at times, but that’s the only thing that got me here.”

A former Glasgow scrum-half and sevens devotee, Barreto suffered his first major injury in October 2024 running drills with the GB boys. A sidestep, a grubber kick, then bang – down as though picked off by a sniper. The hallmark of a ruptured Achilles.

Initially I thought I really wanted to be in the environment and help out then a week in, I realised I just didn’t want to be there.

“I knew it was the end of my season,” he says. “Initially I thought I really wanted to be in the environment and help out then a week in, I realised I just didn’t want to be there. Being home, removed, having my support network from family was the only way I rationalised it. I wasn’t the best. I internalised a lot of my feelings.

“What’s weirdly tough is acknowledging this pain and these emotions are quite relative. It’s not a selfish thing but in professional sport, the other guys don’t care. They care about you, they feel bad for you, but then they’re on to the next job. I’ve been there myself. You are going through that much, but the guys have a bigger focus.

“The best moments were when I learned to accept things – crying, screaming, happiness. They always tell you perspective fixes things but truthfully one hour is better than another, one day is better than the next. It’s a rollercoaster but it’s about accepting and embracing those emotions rather than trying to ignore them and push on.”

Barreto is a physiotherapist’s dream. He attacked his rehab, did all his extras and waited for his body to respond. Seven months passed and Barreto was still waiting. A once taut and muscular calf now resembled a shoestring. He was putting in the work, so why wasn’t he seeing results? More scans, more bleak news. Barreto needed another operation; a bigger one; a procedure he didn’t know existed and would put him out of the game for 12 more months.

 

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“It was tricky because down south, GB were changing physios a lot and unfortunately everyone believed they had a solution. The scan showed my gastrocnemius [the large, two-headed muscle running from knee to heel] had contracted upwards. I was told it was like towing a car with a slack rope – useless. I was in no pain, I just had no feeling through the nerves.

“I saw guys who came back from this operation and weren’t quite the same. I got a couple of hamstring grafts from a cadaver and they pulled the muscle down. They said it was probably a year to get back playing and two years for certain other things. I have sensation but sometimes I don’t feel force in that leg – it’s a bit odd. I hadn’t done a calf raise or activated that muscle for so long. You can’t just switch the nerves back on. Some things I might never get back. I haven’t thought about that too deeply because I’m still functioning. It’s just the unfortunate reality.”

Finally, Barreto began to see and feel progress. Then his plans collapsed again. In July last year, it was announced GB Sevens would no longer operate on a centrally contracted basis. Players would be part-time, gathering only for pre-tournament training and competition. Effectively, Barreto had lost his job at the time he needed it most.

“We went from thinking sponsors were coming in, it was 90% there, to the next minute there being nothing. There was nothing for me to come back to. How on earth am I going to get the support I need? That was the biggest worry. If I did get support, I knew being off-feet I wasn’t very able and it was going to be unpaid recovery.

I need to earn money; I’ve got a home to support. This is reality, which I had probably been shielded and mollycoddled from.

“I need to earn money; I’ve got a home to support. This is reality, which I had probably been shielded and mollycoddled from. I’d still been paid enough to enjoy life and push hard in sevens and suddenly that and rugby are stripped from you.”

And so began a painstaking and lonesome period of solo rehab. Barreto trained on his own in Central Scotland, professional in his approach, but far from the GB base and without the carrot of a club or a contract to strive towards. He took some speaking engagements, worked in the family water bottle business and began managing his local gym to earn some coin.

What he needed was stability. Any athlete facing such an ordeal has a physiotherapist to guide them, from slings, moonboots and crutches right up to the moment they are ready to rock again. They spend hours together, for months on end, while the rest of the team does its thing. Often, the physio sees the athlete at their most vulnerable and the relationship which forms is about as powerful as it gets in sport.

“I’d been rehabbing myself and I’ve not got a degree in physiotherapy,” Barreto says. “It wasn’t your standard ‘you’re injured and you get help’. It was a lot more tricky.”

Scottish Rugby picked up the baton and supported Barreto. They supplied him with access to biweekly physiotherapy, albeit at a local clinic where any member of the public might be in the treatment room next door.

The real coup was the union’s reinvestment in sevens. There was significant dismay in Scotland when the GB model arose, amalgamating three unions to comply with Olympic qualification criteria and World Rugby’s bid for a more streamlined series. In a two-team system, every development pathway is precious and Scotland had been shorn of one of theirs.

Performance director David Nucifora sees huge value in the abbreviated format and Scottish Rugby has now taken responsibility for resurrecting and running GB Sevens under experienced coach Ciaran Beattie. The GB model functions during the SVNS itself, but for the first time in four years, Scotland has a core group of contracted sevens players and opportunities for youngsters to grow.

Had this not happened, it is highly unlikely Barreto would have been in a position to compete for the final two legs in Spain and France.

It wasn’t an arrogant thing, but I was going to be there to compete otherwise what was the point?

“I would have had four days of training and maybe not even been invited to a camp in the old programme,” he says. “To have it here in Scotland, selfishly, has been such a win and such an opportunity.

“When GB became a thing, it was as though everyone wanted it but there’s nothing like wearing a thistle and going out for your country. None of us are hiding from that.

“For most players sevens will accelerate your game. For the likes of Rory McHaffie [the 19-year-old Scotland U20 winger] it’s going to push them immensely. Being out on the wide pitch of Dubai in 36C heat with seven players in front of you and the most space you’ve ever seen, you can’t highlight skills on a better stage than that.”

Barreto drove down to Oriam in February for a meeting with James Moore, Scottish Rugby’s head of physiotherapy and rehabilitation. Moore has a commanding CV: leading roles with Team GB at back-to-back Olympic Games, a stint as Andy Murray’s top physio and another with the Brooklyn Nets. When it came to Barreto’s prospects, Moore was blunt.

“From the off you can tell the quality James has,” Barreto says. “We had the most candid conversation around what does my return look like? Where do they want to get me to? What have I done?

“James stripped it back and said ‘okay, these are the standards if you want to play elite sevens – you have to be here’. He was straight-up.”

Then Barreto spoke to Beattie. He put all his cards on the table. He’d move his gym shifts to train full-time. He’d scrap for selection for Valladolid. And he gave voice to his grandest dream of all: playing at the LA Olympics in 2028.

The last time Barreto played a match of any kind, he wound up prone and shattered in the grandeur of Monaco. South Africa had beaten GB in the final qualification tournament to book the last ticket for Paris 2024.

Playing for Portugal was the true goal for three months but when I watched Dubai I was like, wow, the money might not be better but my heart is there.

“A part of the delusion, I told ‘Beatso’ what I’ve written down is I want to go to LA. I said that’s where I want to be, so he knew where my head was at. The whole priority was being available for training during the GB week.

“He hadn’t seen me play and I hadn’t really touched a rugby ball. I did 100 passes in the gym the week before I came in because I hadn’t really thought about rugby, just physical stuff. I told him I was trying to make it to Spain and he could probably have said right then it wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t an arrogant thing, but I was going to be there to compete otherwise what was the point?”

When the players came together, Barreto was pawing at the ground. He needed to confront the seven-on-seven, bone-on-bone demands of his sport. He had to place himself in the decision-making crucible again and discover if the game he loves still loved him back. Watching training, Beattie said it looked like he’d never been away. Barreto thought his old friend was being kind, until he saw the squad sheet for Valladolid. The searing heat of Southern Spain beckons this weekend, and with it, the closing of a turbulent chapter.

“I won’t truly know how it will feel until I’m out there,” Barreto says. “I’ve always, no matter how many games I’ve played, or how big they were on paper, been extremely nervous. I get that imposter syndrome regardless. I can’t shake it but I’m super excited to feel it again.”

For a time, Barreto thought he may be done with sevens. He was born in Portugal and at the start of this whole business, seriously explored playing for the Lobos at next year’s World Cup. Things progressed to such an extent that Barreto flew to Portugal and met their hierarchy. Then he switched on the Dubai SVNS and almost immediately, those aspirations melted.

“Playing for Portugal was the true goal for three months but when I watched Dubai I was like, wow, the money might not be better but my heart is there.”

Almost nobody knows this. Barreto has long used his social media to advocate for sevens and share the warts-and-all nature of life at the coalface. Lately, his Instagram has been unusually sparse.

“I’ve had guys come in and say ‘oh, I didn’t know you were back yet’. I’ve done so much work alone, I haven’t posted anything for a period of time. I’ve been in the shadows. If I scream from the rooftops no-one actually cares. I’ve got to do it myself and prove it to myself with the support of the people closest to me.”

Barreto could be wearing a Portugal shirt next year, instead of a Scotland Sevens one. He could be retired, managing his gym, doing his speaking, helping his family run their business. He could have succumbed to the flurry of blows that knocked him over and then struck him again while he was down. He could have fallen off the rails at so many points. Through it all, his belief was unshaken.

“Physically, I honestly never thought I wouldn’t get back. In my head I was like, I’m gonna get back, it’s just a matter of when. I never wavered from that internally. It sounds easy for me to say now I’m here but from the start – you can ask anyone in my inner circle – it was never a question. Not even 1%. It was second nature. I did all the work because that’s where I was going to be.”

Barreto is asked if the past two years have changed him. He says they haven’t, they’ve merely confirmed who he is and what he stands for. Now, at last, it’s time for the rugby world to see that again.