Doing a little reading about the national soccer teams and it seems that nearly all the Brazilian players are known by their nicknames – Ronaldinho (real name Ronaldo de Assis Moreira), Rivaldo (Vítor Borba Ferreira), Kaka (Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite), Cafu (Marcos Evangelista de Moraes) etc. Those few players who aren’t known by their nickname go by their first name, not last as would be usual (and printed on the jersey) – Adriano, Roberto Carlos, etc.
Questions: Why is Brazil so special in this regard? I know that nicknames are common there, but I’m sure lots of players around the world have nicknames. Why do the Brazilians get them to be “official”, as it were.
Are there any other examples of sports where jerseys/record books/rosters/etc. use someone’s nickname (or in a lesser case, first name)? About the only example I can think of might be the baseball player Ichiro Suzuki who usually goes by simply Ichiro. Of course the XFL (american football) tried using nicknames with hilariously absurd results (He Hate Me).
As for why the Brazilians use nicknames…just lookit the length of their surnames, you’d have the name going up one sleeve , across the back, down the other sleeve and ending up on his socks
Well that’s certainly a good guess, but it certainly didn’t stop the Dutch player** Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink** from getting his (3) last names on a jersey [pic]
I mean, really. You look at this list of FIFA World Cup squads and it’s all pretty recognizable as first and last names even though it’s Iranian names, Chinese names, French names, English names, etc. Then you get to Brazil and it’s a whole bunch of single name entries. Cher, Madonna anyone?
I notice that Spain has a couple of the single name things going on too (Xavi, Raul, etc). Again, though these are just first names not completely changed nicknames.
The answer to the OP is simply that in Brazil, a cultural practice is to use single nicknames as identifiers. In a similar way, Indonesians often have only one name. Amazingly, not every place does what Americans do.
Not that I know anything about Brazilian soccer, but one point worth mentioning is that many nicknames are diminutives of other names.
We do this in English, but not to the extent that Brazilians do.
From your list, Ronaldinho is a diminutive of Ronaldo, like Jimmy instead of James.
To the American ear, Brazilians use an awful lot of diminutives in their language, saying “gordinha” instead of “gorda” to say “chubby” instead of “fat” and so on. If an American were to sprinkle English with as many diminutives as the Brazilians do in Portuguese, the effect would be syrupy-sweet cutesy, over the top. But that’s just the way they speak there and it’s got a nice rhythm and flow.
Actually, the Portuguese and Angolan teams on this list also have many single name entries. Maybe we’re on to something here. Or maybe not, since it seems that the use of nicknames is an especially Brazilian tradition.
AFAIK he has always had STELIOS on the back of his shirt rather than GIANNAKOPOULOS. Quite a few foreign players in the English league have their first names on their shirts rather than their surnames. But, typically, I can only think of one right now, Benjani Mwaruwari of Portsmouth.
I do, though, recall Celtic’s ill-fated signing, the unfortunately named Rafael Scheidt. They decided to put RAFAEL on his shirt; sadly, though, he lived up to his surname and only played for one match.
In Jordi Cruyff’s case it’s because, at least in Spain, if you say Cruyff it’s understood to be his father. So using Cruyff for Junior’s jerseys would have caused a lot of confusion. Sportscasters usually refer to Sr as “Cruyff” and Jr as “Jordi Cruyff” or “Jordi”. (I had to think real hard to remember that Cruyff’s firstname is Johan… Cruyff senior’s, I mean)
Raúl’s lastname is González. With a lastname like that, not even in the military would you be called by it. If it’s not the most common lastname in Spain, it’s the second or third. OTOH his firstname is quite unusual (but not so much as to sound funny).
Vennegoor of Hesselink is not three lastnames. It’s one, which happens to be three words.
A few years back, Spain suddenly discovered handball (something about some blonde dating the captain of the national squad*). The two most important teams are Barça and Portland San Antonio, whose coach is Zupo Equisoáin. One day the guy who does the layover signs at one of the TV stations must have been new: he wrote Equisoáin’s name as “Juan Carlos Equisoáin”. While the walls at Mom’s aren’t particularly thin, I am reasonably sure that the loud exclamations I heard from other flats more or less at the same time as Lilbro said “¡ZUPO, ****!” were equivalent in meaning (the four-letter word added for emphasis may have been a different one). Zupo says not even his mother and wife call him Juan Carlos: if you call him that, he won’t notice it’s for him.
Infanta Cristina, the Kings’ second daughter, married Txiqui or Chiqui Beguiristáin… another one that everybody refers to him by nick (a very common one in the Basque Country, meaning ‘little one’ because he’s the youngest child).
The Nuggets’(basketball) Brazilian Nene Hilario has always gone by Nene. I actually had to look up his last name having forgotten it, even being a Nuggets fan.
In Brazil’s “other” big sport, jiu-jitsu/MMA, almost all of the competitors go by their regular first and last names. Babalu is the only exception I can think of.
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