It’s about 7 o’clock in the evening at the Estadio Sarría in Barcelona on the 5^th July 1982. Although the scorching 30-degree afternoon heat has started to subside, waves of jubilant Italian fans pour out of the stadium and prolong the pumped up and delirious atmosphere. This is because a match dubbed “the greatest football game of all time” has just been played, and Italy have won, beating a star-studded Brazilian team 3-2 thanks to a Paolo Rossi hat-trick.

To add a more poisonous sting to the wounds of the Brazil side, they are forced to wait inside their team coach in the stadium car park. Why? The Italy team bus has boxed them in. And the celebrating Rossi, Gentile, Antognoni et al were in no rush to leave their changing room.

And yet for Sócrates, captain of that Brazil side, this is not a difficult memory to look back on. When asked 30 years later whether the perception of his side as one of the all-time greatest did anything to ease the pain of defeat in that game, he replied: “If we had won, it would have been the same for me. I measure success by the experiences we live; and to play for a side like that is like dating the woman you’re in love with.”

This answer is typical Sócrates, at once revealing both an artistic imagination and a penchant for philosophy that distinguishes him from most other footballers.

Equally, his tendency to seemingly rationalize and debate the actual importance of winning a game, or even playing football itself, would cause every modern football manager to pull their hair out, and at least a few of Sócrates’s old bosses did just that. Sócrates was the antithesis of a “modern footballer”: He enjoyed a drink and a smoke, and his attitude in training varied throughout his career.

And this was because for Sócrates professional football was just one part of the picture. Until the age of 24 he balanced a club career at Botafogo with a medical degree, and he was determined to become a licensed doctor before any serious application to football. Indeed, for a long time Sócrates believed that a career as a doctor was a much more suitable profession because it directly engaged with improving the lives of others. And so his acceptance of a transfer to Corinthians in 1978, upon completion of his studies, was an initially reluctant one. Now, Corinthians is considered his spiritual home.  

Known as “El Doctor”, Socrates’s delayed start to professional football contributed to his startlingly unique physique. In doing so, he chose to miss out on the physical conditioning young players put themselves through. And yet, his gangly 6ft 4 in. frame somehow became totally synchronised when he got on the pitch and earnt him the second nickname of “Big Skinny”. And this was not a Peter Crouch-esque player where everything looked uncoordinated and flailing until suddenly the sweetest of connections was made. Sócrates actually got his unusually shaped body to play with genuine grace.

When you watch back over videos of Sócrates, it is a reminder of how so few of the tricks and skills we see in the modern game are freshly thought up. His backheels, in particular, are tantalisingly silky and incisive, and they help draw lines from the grainy footage of the 70s to the Neymars and Mbappes on show today. This is particularly important for a younger generation of football fans who can occasionally be found to generalise football the from pre-Premier League era as too different to be able to relate to. When watching footage of the ’82 quarter-final, John Motson’s commentary is another quite surreal bridge from that generation to the current crop.

But it is probably Sócrates’s political consciousness and activism that helped to create a truly unique character within footballing history. Sócrates was an avowed socialist and a professed admirer of left-wing revolutionaries like Ché Guevara. Much like the underlying rationale behind the pursuit of his medical degree, he firmly believed that football was mostly a conduit to his more meaningful political struggle. Reflecting on his life and career in one interview, he contended that: 

“Football came by accident. I was more interested in politics… If people do not have the power to say things, then I will say it for them. While I was a footballer my legs amplified my voice”.

Allegedly, it took his father to persuade him that playing football for Corinthians would actually provide a platform from which he could influence Brazil’s pressing issues of corruption and inequality. Had Sócrates had it his way, he would have been working in a hospital during the 1982 world cup.  

Socrates’s political activism developed in the context of a Brazilian military dictatorship characterised by repression and the stifling of freedom of expression. This government came to power in 1964 through a coup d’etat orchestrated by the armed forces to overthow João Goulart, a President who they perceived as demonstrating leftist inclinations towards land redistribution and nationalization which would threaten the interests of the elite.

It is decidedly ironic, given Socrates’s earlier conviction that a career in football would stifle his political energies, that Corinthians FC would become his main vehicle of protest towards the military government. During the 1970s, the rigid and authoritarian structure of rule imposed upon Brazil fed into the nation’s football clubs. At Corinthians a system of “concentracao” enforced by the club’s controversial President Vicente Matteus saw players prevented from leaving their hotels for days on end in the build up to a match as well as being in bed by 10 at night. For a player who saw football as just one part of life’s vivid tapestry, it’s hardly surprising that this didn’t go down well with Sócrates.

Tactics and selection were also centralised in the power of the coach to an extreme extent and, within this microcosm of the Brazilian political landscape, “The Corinthians Democracy” emerged inside Corinthinas, a socialist movement which sought to disrupt the established status quo. Corinthians enjoyed a rich left-wing history and to this today is known as “Time de Povo” (Team of the People) and so, gradually, Sócrates and his team-mate’s frustrations at both the club and the broader political situation began to coalesce into organised discussions. In the early stages, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what this translated to in practical terms. There was certainly a strong sense collective spirit which would also create friction. After a tour to Central America in 1981, the team decided that two prominent first-team players, Cesar Caju and Rafael, did not share the same mentality and were instructed to leave.

Interestingly, the real trigger for change came when Matteus was replaced by Waldermar Pires in 1981. Pires’s appointment was not perceived as a significant break by many at the club, given his close links to Matteus and the Brazilian economic elite through a career in stockbroking. However, he was seemingly more attuned to the frustrations of his players. Or, perhaps, the club’s severe dip in form in recent years -Corinthians had been relegated to the Silver Cup (the second division) just before he took over- caused him to seek more radical solutions.

Whatever the reason, Pires appointed Adilson Alves as director of football at Corinthians shortly after his own appointment. This was significant. Alves, a young sociology graduate with a socialist background, embraced the raw revolutionary fervour developing across the club. And suddenly, symbolised through the trio of Alves, Sócrates, and another player named Wladimir, the Corinthians Democracy Movement truly began to take shape as the club re-structured its governance to be totally democratic.

What did this mean? Sócrates laid out the changes quite clearly: “Everyone at the club had the same right to vote – the person who looked after the kit and the club president, all their votes had the same weight”. All the dictatorial rules previously imposed on the club’s staff were voted on and, usually, overturned. But the movement went further still. Every member of staff at the club be it the kitman, the person in the ticker-box on match day, or the left-winger, were able to vote on issues like enormous decisions like the club’s next transfer to smaller and ostensibly less meaningful issues like the lunch everybody would have in between training sessions.

Such was the nature of the military government at the time, one would have expected these acts alone to be repressed in some way. However, that same government had spent the last decade promoting itself off the back of the back of the national team’s success. It projected itself as aligned with Brazil’s great football stars as a means to secure legitimacy, and this move ultimately gave Sócrates and Corinthians Democracy some wiggle room.

So much so, that in 1982 the Corinthian’s team were led onto the pitch for a game by Sócrates with “I Want to Vote for my President” inscribed onto their backs of their jerseys. During the same season, the Corinthians side played a match against Juventus with “Dia 15 Vote” on their jerseys, a message designed to encourage people to vote in the upcoming state elections. It was acts like this that, where the bubble of democracy within Corinthians burst and its players and ideologies engaged with the wider nation, that Sócrates’s band of revolutionaries began to genuinely influence the direction of Brazil’s political discourse.

It is interesting that despite his left-wing beliefs, Sócrates never took to party politics. Other players in the Corinthian’s joined the Centrist Party of the Worker’s party but Sócrates seemed much more content spreading a message of political engagement and activism that cut across party lines and in doing became more overtly anti the current dictatorial establishment. He didn’t mind who Brazilians voted for, as long as they were voting and engaging in a legitimate democratic system.

Ultimately, mass mobilization of the working class and the emergence of the then lesser known Lula Da Silva was what caused the regime to collapse in 1985. It’s easy to look back on the significance of Sócrates’s role within this wider movement through rose-tinted spectacles. In fact, disillusioned with the slow ebb of democracy across Brazil, he actually left to play his football in Italy in 1984 as a symbol of protest. But that is also not to say his impact on Corinthians was not insignificant. It is more helpful, though, to analyse Sócrates’s actions and ideology as just one piece of a much larger and more complex revolutionary canvas.

And we can also quite easily and justifiably romanticise Sócrates as a human. The Corinthians Democracy movement was quite unique; in my mind there is quite literally no kind of comparable intersection between sport and politics (if there is, please comment below ). Not just this, he somehow managed to express his worldview through his football skills and decision-making on the pitch as much as through his political activism. That is quite unique.

This is not the first documentation of his life and experiences and, testimony to his enduring legacy, it won’t be the last. As this article wraps up it feels almost inevitable to compare Sócrates with the great number of professional Brazilian footballers who now stand in support of their current right-wing pro-guns climate-change sceptic President, Jair Bolsonaro. Sócrates is certainly different to these guys, and more likeable too, but there has also been a broader contextual shift which makes it unclear how useful it is to compare specific individuals. Has football become so commercialised and professionalized that it is unlikely it will ever produce another Sócrates? Only time will tell, but maybe Raheem Sterling has already answered that question. For the time being, though, quiet comfort can be taken by simply revisiting Sócrates’s life and celebrating his uniqueness.