“If I gave him one thing, it is to fight for what you want all the time,” his mother Flavia Junqueira explained to BBC Sport.
Looking at Joao Pedro’s story, that is exactly what he has had to do.
His mother, along with his grandmother, have largely brought him up.
Reports from Joao Pedro’s early childhood show his father, former Botafogo footballer Jose Joao de Jesus – more commonly known as Chicao – spent around eight years in prison after being charged as an accessory to murder and was rarely around.
Junqueira later separated from him and focused on her son’s footballing potential.
“Joao had a dream,” she said. “I shared that dream with my son. The dream didn’t have a price.”
Growing up in Ribeirao Preto, a nine-hour drive inland from Rio de Janeiro, Joao Pedro was eventually scouted by one of the city’s clubs Fluminense, along with a host of other leading Brazilian clubs.
Fluminense were regarded as the best option for the youngster’s development, who, like his father, began as a defensive midfielder before progressing further forward.
That choice was, however, fraught with difficulty.
Junqueira left her job, friends and family for Rio, and Joao Pedro “cried a lot” during the journey and in the weeks that followed because of homesickness.
Even in the academy, he was told he “wasn’t strong enough” and would not make it. Again, it made him cry.
But his mother, despite her increasingly limited means after leaving her job, hired a personal trainer for her son.
At first, he ate well and trained well only because she told him to. Eventually, however, the penny dropped.
“He was very skinny and there was a significant physical disparity between him and the other athletes in his age group,” his long-time personal trainer Rodrigo Goncalves told BBC Sport.
“He never stopped training. Sometimes he went a bit reluctantly, pushed by his mother, but he went.
“Over the years, however, that changed. He began to mature and understand that training wasn’t just something his mother required, but rather a tool to improve his performance, develop his body and build the physical balance needed for football.”
Joao Pedro became one of the stars of Fluminense’s academy and was spotted by Watford’s South America scout Rafa Monfort. A phone call from now-Tottenham striker Richarlison, who had made the same move, also proved crucial.
As a child, Joao Pedro was hooked on Premier League football, so the idea of moving to Watford appealed to him. However, it took around eight months to meet the Governing Body Endorsement criteria and secure a UK work permit.
Junqueira believes an overhead kick scored by Joao Pedro, then 17, against Cruzeiro in May 2019 helped convince decision-makers he was an exceptional talent worthy of the move.
When the family arrived in December 2019, Junqueira had not anticipated her bank cards would not work in England. However, then-Watford goalkeeper Heurelho Gomes, also Brazilian, took them under his wing and even bought them Christmas dinner.
A few months later, Covid and lockdown arrived, but Joao Pedro used the unprecedented period to focus on physical training with Goncalves again. He transformed his body by gaining around eight kilograms of body mass and became Premier League-ready.
After that period, he was no longer the little boy who cried, but a fully-fledged top-flight star capable of taking each step and challenge in his stride.
