Futebol

by Alex Bellos

  'Players are not always chosen on individual talent in our country. Privileges can help you at all levels. If you have a personal or political or family relation with a player, maybe you will favour him beyond his capacity.'

  This provides an opportunity to start talking about what has happened to the national team. I ask why he thinks Brazil are playing so badly, when – even if overall quality is not what it once was – Brazil still has the highest concentration of talented footballers in the world.

  Socrates is clear in his response: 'Players get into the team to be negotiated to Europe. This puts them in the shop window. European clubs like to contract players who have already played for the Brazilian national team. I think the team is being used much more as a negotiating table rather than for professional reasons.'

  Some figures: in his two years as national coach, Wanderley Luxemburgo called up ninety-one players. Emerson Leao, in six months, called up sixty-two. Luiz Felipe Scolari, who started off saying that what was needed was continuity, called up forty-two in his first three months. Admittedly any Brazilian coach is faced with an embarrassment of riches, and there are more international games than there used to be – but still? In total, sixty-two Brazilians played for their country during the eighteen World Cup qualifying games. Argentina, who won the group, used half that amount.

  'In every game there is an absurdly large number of different players. The base changes every hour. The style changes every hour. There is no tactical planning. Of course the team is not going to do well. Now if you want to put together a team you could. You could win the World Cup. It's just putting together characteristics. Of course it's possible to create a good team. They just don't want to.'

  Them. Them. The enemy within.

  Brazilians who play for European clubs often fail to perform well when they play for the national team. They are invariably criticised for putting more passion into their clubs than their country. They are badmouthed as arrogant and greedy; derided as mercenaries. I find this hardly surprising. Brazilians who play abroad are known as the 'estrangeiros', or foreigners, when they return home. If you are called a 'foreigner' by your own countrymen, then how can you expect to build team unity based around national pride?

  Socrates believes that the 'foreigners' play badly for a simpler reason. They know that the team isn't chosen on merit. 'There is no bigger thrill for a footballer than playing with people from the same culture. So these players should come to the national team with complete pleasure. But they don't – because they feel more than anyone that individual talent is not valued. They know other interests are at play. Why would Rivaldo and Roberto Carlos come here and play with someone who is ten times worse than them?'

  Socrates says that this is not a new phenomenon. It has been going on for more than a decade. How, I then ask, did Brazil in this period manage to reach two World Cup finals?

  'Of course, sometimes there are spells when more serious people are involved in the process . . . but we are now in a period between World Cups, which is a time when [having a good team] is not valued very much. Every area of football today is based around selling players. This occurs, either licitly or illicitly, at every team at every level. It has created the conditions for our football to go down the pan. If you don't have a long-term strategy or planning, of course the quality will fall a lot.'

  I return to my question about why he played well, even though he is not black.

  'I had to develop my game through necessity. First, I am impatient, always looking for new experiences. This is part of my character. Second, the more difficult things are, the more this stimulates you. I played football and studied medicine at the same time. I had to be more inventive than anyone else. If I hadn't studied medicine I would have been a more limited player than I was. Definitely.

  'And of course it was another era. Our references were different. I played against Ademir da Guia, Rivelino, Pelé-My generation had this mirror that the current generation doesn't have. We were playing with exceptional players and we were always trying to catch up with them, learning from them, trying to get close to them. This already pulls you right up there.'

  Interviewing Socrates is a refreshing experience. In Brazil, footballers are usually shockingly underprivileged and uneducated. Yet Socrates, while being atypical, is nevertheless distinctly and overwhelmingly Brazilian. His easygoing posture, his empathetic informality, his humour and the lilting music in his Portuguese are national traits, as well as an instinctive desire to expound strong convictions about football. He just approaches the subject in a more intellectual way.

  Most reassuringly, he has internalised his role as the futebol philosopher. He tells me that he thinks there is another reason why Brazil do not play the way they used to.

  'A football player in the 1970s ran an average distance each game of 4km. Today this has almost tripled. Which means that the spaces between players are relatively smaller. This causes a lot more physical contact, and makes it a lot more difficult for the player to create moves. Today, if you can't play with one touch you have little chance of playing at the top level. As a consequence football has become uglier.'

  I tell him this sounds believable.

  'So – the sport needs to change. It needs to take into account the physical evolution of the game. All other sports have adapted their rules because of human physical development. But football never has.'

  To recreate the conditions for beautiful football he wants to reduce the number of players in each side.

  To how many, I ask?

  'Nine,' he replies. 'Nine-a-side. The theory is this: to improve the quality of football, to have less injuries and for the players to use their technical ability more – you need to compensate for the physical evolution of the athletes.'

  His talk is not just bar chat. Socrates is about to start a masters thesis at the São Paulo School of Medicine, arguing that football should become nine-a-side.

  It seems to me that behind the dry rationale of Socrates' analysis is the constant Brazilian urge to creatively transgress laws and rules. Brazil has already invented one-a-side (the keepie-uppie queens), two-a-side (footvolley), five-a-side (futsal) and seven-a-side (society football). Socrates is filling in the gaps.

  It is perhaps my most childish question. And with good reason. Ever since 1982, when I was twelve, I have wanted to ask Socrates if his name had influenced the person he is. I tell him that I find it hard to disassociate the name from his style – both on and off the pitch.

  I discover that the question was more insightful than I thought.

  'The name in itself doesn't do anything,' he replies. 'But it's obvious that from the moment that you think "why did my father decide to give me that name?" you realise what kind of a man my father is. My father lived in his library. So I lived with him there. I read a hell of a lot. He passed this experience to me, especially because I was the oldest.'

  Socrates tells me he has brothers called Sofocles and Sostenes (the Portuguese transliterations of Sophocles and Sosthenes), which are also a reflection on his father's reading matter. (Socrates has another brother, Rai, who played for Paris St Germain and the Brazilian national team in the 1994 World Cup.)

  'My dad was from a very poor family. He wasn't able to study. He had to go to work young. He was a real self-learner. He gave me my name and he has a lot to do with who I am.'

  Have you read Plato, I ask?

  'Of course. I read loads of philosophers. I like Plato, I really like Machiavelli and I really like Hobbes. It depends on the time, on your head, on where you are going . . . I read a lot, not everything, but I really like philosophy, not formally, more out of curiosity.'

  In 1964, the year of the military coup, Socrates was ten years old. An incident that happened at home sparked off an interest in politics. On the day the army took power his father took a book from his library, on the Bolsheviks, and burnt it. 'I didn't even know what it was, I had an inkling it was something about the Russian Revolution, but what
struck me was the act.'

  It sowed the seed of Socrates' left-wing views. 'I am the child of a dictatorial system,' he says. 'When I started college at sixteen, I started to live through the repression – there were colleagues who had to hide, who had to run away.' His ethical beliefs guided his football career. (Plato would have been so proud.) Two decades before Aldo Rebelo and the Brazilian Congress tried to change football, Socrates did it from the inside. In what sounds more like a hidden chapter of ancient Greek history, Socrates founded a player-movement called 'Corinthians Democracy'.

  Socrates started his career at Botafogo, the local team in Riberao Preto. In 1978 he transferred to Corinthians, in São Paulo. After a few years he started to tire of the way he and the players were treated by the management. Players were never consulted on decisions. It was an authoritarian atmosphere that paralleled the political situation of the country.

  So, Socrates – together with his team-mate Wladimir-rose up against the club hierarchy. They organised their footballing colleagues into a Utopian socialist cell, called Corinthians Democracy, which took control of all the decisions that would affect them. 'We decided everything by consensus,' says Socrates. 'It was simple things, like "what time will we have lunch". We would suggest, say, three options and we would vote on it. And the majority decision was accepted. Problems hardly existed. There are only problems if there are confrontations of opinion. And there weren't any. Everything was voted on.'

  But it was not just 'simple things'. Corinthians Democracy voted to print 'vote on the fifteenth' on the backs of their shirts in the run-up to elections on 15 November 1982. The elections – for federal deputies, senators, governors and mayors – were one of the first steps towards ending the dictatorship.

  Socrates' comrades also challenged the 'concentracao', which is the part of Brazilian footballing culture that is perhaps the greatest affront to players' liberties. The word means 'concentration' in the military sense, of 'bringing together troops'. It is usual for Brazilian clubs to insist that before every match – no matter how unimportant – the team must sleep in a hotel, often for several days at a time. The reasoning behind it is that players are not grown-up enough to look after themselves, and must be supervised. 'Footballers are not mature enough to behave themselves before games without anyone supervising them,' argues the national coach Luiz Felipe Scolari. 'It's been proved that sex before a game isn't bad for you. But, for our players, they don't do things by halves. At home they behave more normally. Away from home, with their other sexual partners, they want to prove that they are the best lovers in the world. So they go carousing and tire themselves more, to the point that their performance on the pitch is affected.' The concentracao may be paternalistic, he says, but it is for the players' own good.

  Corinthians: political football

  'It took us six months to change the rules about the concentracao,' explains Socrates. 'This was the trickiest one. There was a certain fear, which remains until today – that without the concentracao some players feel exposed. But, ideologically speaking, concentracao exists to lower a person's status. It's like: "You aren't worth anything. You are irresponsible. You need to be a prisoner." It's stupid. The better someone is feeling, the better he will play. It's obvious. And where do you feel better than in your own home?'

  He smiles sincerely when he remembers the battles that were won. In 1982, Corinthians won the São Paulo state championship with 'Democracia' printed on their shirts.

  'Perhaps it was the most perfect moment I ever lived. And I'm sure it was for 95 per cent of the others too.'

  Because Socrates' movement happened in football – at São Paulo's biggest club – it was very public, and it spilled out into the national political arena. Corinthians Democracy became a point of reference for the debate raging about the democratisation of the military regime. Socrates became an important figure in the campaign for presidential elections.

  In 1984, aged thirty, he spoke at a rally of one and a half million people. He made the crowd a pledge: if Congress passed a constitutional amendment to re-establish free presidential elections, which they were due to vote on a few days later, he would turn down an offer to play in Italy.

  The vote did not pass, Socrates went to Fiorentina, and the era of Corinthians Democracy was over. But the groundswell of momentum for political opening was unstoppable. A year later, a civilian, José Sarney, was made president, which started the transition to free presidential elections in 1989.

  Nothing like Corinthians Democracy has ever happened again. I ask what he thinks its legacy is: 'In terms of working conditions we caused deep changes. Today the valuation of players' rights is a lot more than it was before, and we played a fundamental part.'

  Socrates' heroes are Che Guevara and John Lennon. 'The only people I would put a poster of on my wall,' he says. His political beliefs are well known in the most unexpected places.

  For several years he has written a column for an Arab newspaper. In 1996, it invited him on a publicity tour of Egypt and Libya. When he arrived in Tripoli he was informed that Colonel Muammar al-Gadaffi wanted to meet him.

  'I said: "Cool!",' Socrates recounts. 'It was a fantastic saga.

  'I asked at what time we were going to meet him. They said, "Look, we don't know what time, but we will leave at five in the morning."

  'I got up. There was an embargo. You couldn't enter the country by plane. We were taken to the airport. I asked: "How come? You don't have any planes?" And there was Gadaffi's personal plane. It took us to a city where his government is based. We went to a hotel and waited the whole day. We waited and waited. Then, at 6pm, they said, "The time has come. Let's go!"

  'We got in these Toyota Land Cruisers. The guy drove and drove. It got dark. We drove on to a trail. Then there was a gate, we opened it and entered a camp. It was a desert, or almost a desert. All the lights were switched off. We stayed maybe twenty minutes in the dark before we got to Gadaffi's tent.'

  The Libyan leader and the Brazilian footballer then spent an hour chatting to each other. Gadaffi even had a suggestion.

  'He proposed that I put myself forward for president of Brazil. He said he'd back me and finance my campaign, because he already knew my political opinions.'

  Socrates smiles at me and says he turned the offer down.

  The Doctor has never hidden his smoking and drinking. I ask him if it has harmed his health as an athlete, or if he thinks it makes him a bad role model?

  'This is what I am.' he replies. 'I've smoked since I was thirteen. The only philosophical issue for me is – "Why would I try to pretend I'm something that I'm not?" I smoke. I'll die of lung cancer or of emphysema. I can't stop smoking.'

  Have you ever tried to give up, I ask?

  He laughs out loud: 'Fifty thousand times. But I can't. Even today I tried to stop. But I had my first cigarette at 11am. This is what I am. I'm not that bothered about what other people think. The best thing that a man can have, in the society in which he lives, is independence. I'm not bothered what people think. They can even think I'm gay. So what? It doesn't change anything.'

  When Pelé, to widespread disillusionment, made peace with Ricardo Teixeira, football's democracy movement lost its figurehead. Were there no good men? Socrates answered the call, declaring himself the 'anticandidate' to the Brazilian Football Confederation.

  'At that moment,' he says, 'it became clear that [Pelé and Ricardo Teixeira's] idea was to take the wind out of the sails of the parliamentary commissions. They were saying: "Let's smother it so things continue the same way." No. We need to discuss everything.'

  I ask, then, if his candidacy is serious or rhetorical?

  'It is a banner that I decided to wave to mobilise public opinion. Brazilian football was never discussed. Intrinsically there is no control over the command, and this is something you need to discuss, the CBF is a national entity. Football is our greatest identity, perhaps it's our greatest ambassador. And – dammit – the state has no control
over this. They do as they want to and no one does anything.

  'The repercussion was absurdly big. If there was an election I have no doubt I would get more than 95 per cent of the public's vote. I would have no adversary. But it's not like that, it's a closed shop, it's manipulated, economic power is very present. I will fight to be a candidate, but I do not see the viability yet, the structures aren't in place for it to happen. But in the way that my candidacy grew so much, it's impossible for me to retreat. I will never retreat.'

  I tell him that I read in a newspaper that Pelé would support him.

  'I don't know. I don't know. He always has dubious postures. I don't think so, not any more.'

  Socrates' manifesto contains many eminently sensible proposals, especially those about improving investment in children's education. Some, however, seem so excessively democratic they are downright loopy. He wants the national coach to be voted for by plebiscite.

  He is absolutely serious, but adds: 'If this isn't possible you need to open the decision-making process to a big committee of journalists, coaches, athletes and others. And there should be votes of confidence like in a parliamentary system. If the coach is failing, then he should go back to the board for a new vote.'

  I suggest that this is slightly bureaucratic.

  'Not at all. It is exactly the opposite. There will be more people taking part in the decisions, you will decentralise it. It should never be bureaucratic. Bureaucracy is the conduct of those who want to manipulate the nation. You want to be as democratic as possible. You need to get rid of the bureaucracy.'

  I tell him that a plebiscite is unfeasible. No country in the world has a referendum for their national football coach.

  He smiles again. 'Then we'll be the first.'

  As the interview draws to a natural close, I close my notebook of prepared questions. I want to know if he is depressed by Brazil, if the constant struggle for democracy gets him down. In football too, the professional game is in disarray. Off the pitch it is corrupt, and on it, it's a sisyphean struggle to live up to past expectations. I ask if he is proud to be a Brazilian.