Socrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira, born 19 February, 1954, Belem, Para, Brazil.
PART ONE
Socrates did not choose between football and the mind. He chose both, and he pursued both with the same restless, uncommon intensity. He started playing professionally in 1973, joining Botafogo in Ribeirao Preto, a city in the state of Sao Paulo, while simultaneously studying medicine.
He qualified as a doctor, and his medical degree, combined with the way he played football with the quiet authority of a man who had read everything and panicked about nothing, earned him the nickname that would follow him forever: Doctor Socrates. It suited him perfectly, partly because of the formal qualification, and partly because — like his ancient Greek namesake — he had a gift for making people think, for questioning received wisdom, and for refusing to accept that things had to be done the way they had always been done.
After hitting 35 league goals in 99 league games for Botafogo, the midfield dynamo teamed up with Corinthians in 1978 and he quickly established himself as the heartbeat of one of the most exciting and technically rich sides in Brazilian football, accumulating 172 goals in 297 league appearances during his stay. In the summer of 1984, he signed with Italian Serie A outfit Fiorentina and the move carried a certain logic — Florence, after all, is a city of art and intellect. His time in Tuscany was not a failure, but it was not a transformation either, and he returned to Brazil afterwards, going on to represent Flamengo, Santos and then his first love Botafogo.
The year of 2004 brought another chapter that is almost too strange to be true: Socrates agreed to a one-month player-coaching deal with Garforth Town of the Northern Counties East Football League in England, a club so far removed from the Maracana and the San Siro that the contrast bordered on surreal. On 20 November, he came on as a substitute against Tadcaster Albion, 12 minutes from time, and thereby achieved the distinction of playing competitive football on an English non-league pitch at the age of 50.
Socrates was, in purely technical terms, a phenomenon. Two-footed, powerful in the air due to his height and timing, capable of threading passes through gaps that others did not see, and equipped with a right-foot shot of genuine ferocity and accuracy — he was the complete midfield operator before the term had really been invented. He made attacking runs from deep that arrived in the box at exactly the wrong moment for defenders, and his link-up play connected attacks with an economy of touch that made everything look simpler than it was.
He was not particularly quick, and he knew it, and he made sure it never mattered by controlling the pace of play itself, dictating tempo so that the game ran at whatever speed he chose. That is a rare and sophisticated skill, the ability to play football the way a conductor shapes an orchestra — not by moving fastest, but by making everything else move correctly.
PART TWO
Socrates was handed his long-awaited debut for Brazil in a comfortable and convicting 6-0 friendly victory against Paraguay at Maracana on 17 May 1979, and over the next seven years he would earn 60 caps and score 22 goals, a record that speaks to his goal threat from deep.
There are defeats in sport that become more famous than victories, and what happened to Brazil at the 1982 World Cup in Spain belongs in that strange, melancholy category. Socrates captained that side, a Brazil team so gifted, so committed to attacking, flowing football that they are still spoken about with a reverence usually reserved for champions, despite the fact that they came home without the trophy and finished 5th.
They played football that seemed to come from somewhere beyond tactics — intuitive, joyful, technically spectacular. They tore through their group and were, by common consensus, the most exciting side at the tournament, but they ran into a Paolo Rossi who was on one of those brief, devastating runs of form that no team can adequately prepare for, and Enzo Bearzot´s Italy edged them out by a 3–2 score in a second-round group game that ended their campaign. They had scored 15 goals in six games and still went home early, and the football world mourned it like a small bereavement.
Four years later, in Mexico, Socrates returned to the World Cup stage, now 32 and carrying the miles of a life lived fully, but still capable of the decisive moment. He opened his account in the group stage, scoring the only goal of the game against Spain and he added another in Brazil’s 4–0 demolition of Poland in the round of 16, a penalty dispatched with such extraordinary nonchalance that it almost seemed impolite. He did not run up to the ball. He simply walked to it and struck it, and in it went, as though the whole thing were barely worth the bother.
But football arranged its cruellest appointment for him in the quarter-finals against France. Brazil and France went to penalties after a goalless draw, and when Socrates stepped up, he attempted the same unhurried, strolling penalty he had converted against Poland. This time, Paris Saint-Germain and France goalkeeper Joel Bats read it, reached it, and saved it, and the French ultimately progressed to the semi-finals while Brazil went home. Socrates walked away without looking back at the ball, and anyone watching knew that this, almost certainly, was the end of his World Cup story. It was, and it was desperately unfair that a footballer of his magnitude never got to lift the trophy his talent deserved.
In 1983, Socrates was named South American Footballer of the Year, an honour that confirmed what Corinthians fans and Brazil supporters had known for a long time already — that this man was among the finest players on the planet. In 2004, none other than Pele named Socrates in his FIFA 100 list of the world’s greatest living players, and the choice required no justification whatsoever.
In October 2008, he was inducted into the Pacaembu Brazilian Football Museum Hall of Fame, and the recognition, though long deserved, somehow felt slightly inadequate for a man who had given so much to the game, to his country and to the idea that sport and intellect are not opposites but natural allies.