Okay, I get the lingusistics, or whatever you call it, but are there any Brazilians or soccer fans that can expound on this? I mean, the closest example I can think of in America is that we might call Michael Jordan “MJ” or Shaquille O’Neil “Shaq”, but still announcers still use their real names, and their real names are in lineups.
Why are Brazilians compelled to do this? Is it a way to elevate professional athletes to god-like status? Or to make them familiar household names? Why doesnt ESPN refer to the players by their real names? I mean, were not in Brazil . . okay maybe out of respect, but you know what I mean!
Well, I don’t have a cite for it offhand, but the Chicago Tribune was discussing this, and the gist of it was that it’s all due to marketing. It’s apparently easier to be an international soccer star and attract the attention of talent scouts (or whatever–coaches? who does the hiring in FIFA?), and it increases your chances of transferring to a better (?) team if you have funny-colored hair and a movie-star-type name that sticks in the mind.
In America, music and television seem to be the only things that are popular enough to allow celebrities to go one-name. In Brazil, it just so happens that the sport of soccer is that popular.
I asked my wife about this, and she insists it’s for these two reasons:
(1) Apodos (nicknames) in Brasil are just a cultural thing completely, and it extends very logically into their soccer.
(2) Brasilian names are long, so it makes (1) above all the more meaningful.
I don’t believe the “long name thing” as much as I’d like to, though. After all, my wife is Mexican and has a five word complete name now.
This article (“WAIS: What’s in a name?”) takes the same tack as Balthisar’s wife; it’s an expression of a creative tradition extending far beyond football players.
Brazilian players have been using nicknames since long before the TV age, so marketability is unlikely to be a big factor. The reasons why ESPN don’t use the players’ full names is because they’re too long and because nobody would know who they were.
Having said that, I bet most football fans know who Edson Arantes do Nascimento is. Do you recognise these?
José Roberto Gama de Oliveira
Artur Antunes Coimbra
Carlos Bledorn Verri
Manoel Francisco dos Santos
Valdir Pereira
BTW, the Turkish players seemed to go in the opposite direction and include as much of their names as they could fit on their shirts - even using a comprssed font to help.
Isn’t there also a rather limited number of common surnames in Brazil? It probably makes sense to have nicknames rather than show off the fact that the entire midfield is made of up Bob Dos Santos, Jim Bob Dos Santos, Spike Dos Santos, Elvis Dos Santos, etc.
Is there more than one country that does this? I seem to remember one of the announcers during the Cup saying that the players from one country began using these names as aliases. Apparently, soccer was considered a “lower class” sport, so the upper class men who played used aliases so that they wouldn’t be recognized when the papers ran the results.
Problem is, I can’t remember if he was speaking about Brazil or not.
I think there might be an African country that either does the same thing, or likes to add the “Doctor” monicker to their soccer players. Not 100% about this though.
Also, in MLS, we have a very fine Yugoslavian player known simply as Preki, most likely because his real name is a toungue twister:
Back in the Major Indoor Soccer League’s heyday in the mid-1980s, there was a Yugoslavian player for the Tacoma Stars who went by the single name of Preki. The aforementioned Tatu also starred in the MISL for the Dallas Sidekicks, but I didn’t know he was Brazilian.
Back in the Major Indoor Soccer League’s heyday in the mid-1980s, there was a Yugoslavian player for the Tacoma Stars who went by the single name of Preki. The aforementioned Tatu also starred in the MISL for the Dallas Sidekicks, but I didn’t know he was Brazilian.
Preki used his nickname while playing for Everton and Portsmouth in England prior to leaving for the MLS. I got the distinct impression it was a nickname due to the difficulty in spelling and pronouncing his full name (Predrag Radosavlijevic, more or less), rather than because he used it as a substitute for his real name.
There’s a wide ethnic mix in Brazil, so I doubt they have fewer surnames than any other country of 180 million people. Compare that with South Korea; in their squad they had three players called Kim, five called Lee and five called Choi.
The was a Dutch player who played for Barcelona and Manchester United among others, and who only used his first name - Jordi. That was because he had a very famous dad (Johan Cruyff), whose footsteps were difficult to follow for a son with only a fraction of his talent.
Preki doesn’t always just go by the one name. He’s often listed as Preki Radosavljevic. He played on the US national team (he’s a naturalized citizen) and had Radosavljevic on the back of his jersey.
And I have a little anecdote about Brazilian soccer names. A friend of mine knows Gordon Bradley who coached Pele in the NASL. My friend was visiting Gordon and Pele called. My friend said that Gordon addressed him as Edson, not Pele. I don’t know if that was peculiar to Gordon Bradley or not, but I thought it was interesting.
This mononym trend has not caught on, it seems, with Brazilian Formula One drivers: Rubens Barrichello, Felipe Massa, Enrique Bernoldi, Ayrton Senna (I know, he’s dead), etc.
While I suspect that in Brazil soccer stars are perhaps a few rungs higher on the Fame Ladder than race car drivers, this is puzzling at first glance.
