Footy Blog!!

Luiz Felipe Scolari has just suffered his first defeat as Chelsea manager with the English season still at a relatively early stage.

Back home in Brazil we are in the home straight and Gremio, the club where Scolari made his name, are optimistic of winning the title for the first time since 1996 - when Felipao (yet to be baptised ‘Big Phil’) was at the helm.

Gremio, from the southern city of Porto Alegre, are top of the table with seven rounds to go. They have a workmanlike young side, boosted by the promotion to the first team earlier this month of 18-year-old Douglas Costa, already the target of transfer speculation involving Real Madrid and Manchester United.

But it is not going to be an easy stroll to the title. Just three points behind are the grimly efficient Sao Paulo, title winners in both the last two years. And a point behind them are a trio of heavyweights, Cruzeiro, Flamengo and Palmeiras.

Five teams, then, are dreaming of the title. But that is not the only thing at stake. The top four will qualify for South America’s equivalent of the Champions League, the Copa Libertadores. There isn’t room for everyone.

At the other end of the table, Fluminense’s win on Saturday finally took them out of the relegation zone. Back in July they lost the final of the Libertadores in a penalty shoot-out. They were so close to becoming champions of their continent but are now having an almighty struggle to avoid the drop to the second division.

Next Sunday they face fellow Rio giants Vasco da Gama, who find themselves in an even darker situation, second from bottom and with the worse defensive record in the competition.

It promises to be a cracking end to the season, where issues at top and bottom will not be resolved until the final ball is kicked on 7 December.

Unlike the major European leagues, the Brazilian Championship is very hard to predict. There is no equivalent to the Premier League’s ‘big four’ - the clubs who, before the season even starts, are expected to monopolize the silverware.

When the current season got underway, Fluminense were seen as likely title challengers, and Gremio were a team in crisis. And look at them now.

This unpredictability reflects both the strength and the weakness of Brazilian football.
On the positive side, this is a huge country with lots of major urban centres which have clubs of great tradition. In the early days the Brazilian game was concentrated in Rio and Sao Paulo. With time, the cities of Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte became major players. Other places - such as Curitiba, Salvador and Recife - have important and well-established clubs.

With such a distribution of forces, it is no wonder that the Brazilian Championship is so open. But, if there is an excess of challengers, there is also a deficiency of world class talent.

Contemporary Brazilian football operates an export industry, selling around a thousand players a year abroad - including all the best ones. And as indicated by the speculation surrounding Douglas Costa, they are being sold at an ever younger age.

Last week Palmeiras coach Vanderlei Luxemburgo said that there is currently only one genuine top-class player based in Brazil, Sao Paulo midfielder Hernanes. There are a handful of others who might want to claim a place on his list but it hardly matters - none of them will be playing in Brazil for much longer.

Even the big clubs - perhaps ‘especially the big clubs’ is more accurate - are constantly losing their best players, and it consequently becomes harder for a ‘big four’ style group of giants to break away from the pack. The balance of forces in Brazil is in part explained by a situation of generalised mediocrity.

The problems are exacerbated by an insane calendar which has Brazil out of sync with the rest of the world.

The national championship runs from mid-May to early December. Its start coincides with the closing stages of the Libertadores, its middle with the opening of the global transfer window.

Fluminense are perfect examples of the stress this causes. They played the early matches with reserve sides, concentrating on the Libertadores, which they lost, thus plunging the club into a hangover made worse by the sale of key players to Europe.

The crazy calendar is not there to help the clubs, but to protect and maintain the power structure of Brazilian football. But that’s a subject for another column. In the meantime, at least we have some exciting times in store over the last seven rounds of this year’s championship.

Comments on this week’s piece in the space below. Other questions on South American football to vickerycolumn@hotmail.com, and I’ll pick out a couple next week.

From last week’s postbag:

I’m an avid fan of African football and I was wondering if you have any ideas as to why there are so few African footballers in South America? From what I could discover there isn’t a single African footballer in the top flight of either Argentina or Brazil. I understand that it would be difficult for South American teams to either tempt or afford players from Europe, but it wouldn’t be as difficult to buy African players.

Why do you think there are so few (if any) Africans in South America? Do the clubs just overlook African football or do they have enough faith in their own youth systems that they don’t feel the need to bring in foreign talent? Matt D

There’s only one I can think of off the top of my head - Nigerian striker Abubakar at Vasco - though he was so bad when he had a recent opportunity off the bench that I’m not sure if he’ll be seeing much more action in the club’s relegation battle.
There have been a few over the years - I recall Geremi having a spell in Paraguay, Webo in Uruguay, Segoya in Argentina, Johnson in Brazil. But it’s rare and they don’t usually last long.

There are language problems and distance problems, plus the fact that, like Africa, South America is an exporter. Easier to groom your own to sell than bring an African over and groom him. Internacional in Brazil tried to open up a new way of doing business by bringing some over (I think Abubakar is a fall-out from that deal) - one of them was Obinna, from Nigeria’s Olympic team - I believe that one ended in a contractual wrangle as he went off to Italy.

I was wondering if you can shed any light on the young Brazilian Douglas Costa. There seems to have been a sudden buzz about him in Europe and he’s been strongly linked with Manchester United and with the success of Anderson and early glimpses of promise shown by Rafeal and Possebon it wouldn’t come as a shock if they were watching him. Bazz Cave

There is indeed a lot of fuss about him after just four games.
I remember at the start of the year one of the Spanish sports papers put Santos teenager Tiago Luis on the front cover - the Brazilian Messi, they said. We’re still waiting for him to make the big breakthrough. All the hype can make it hard for a youngster, and the classic Sharon Redd question comes into play - ‘Can you handle it?’

In the case of Douglas Costa the early evidence is very exciting - whippy, wiry figure, lots of exuberance, lovely left foot, not frightened to shoot or try things, sees the pass to slip the right wing back on the diagonal. No doubt about it - one to watch.