Time goes by…

Time goes by… as an old time sports announcer used to say. But in Brazilian football it goes by slowly.

For decades, concepts and clichés have been repeated to exhaustion. I remember one evening in the football roundtable on Rio de Janeiro’s Educational TV, of which I was part. I don't want to give this column a funereal tone, but either I’m very much mistaken or I am one of only two survivors from that show. The other is Luiz Orlando Baptista, much younger than I am.

We were in the 1970s, already in the second half of the decade. Brazil had won the 1970 World Cup, but had finished only fourth in 1974, after being consecutively defeated by the Netherlands and Poland.

One of our guests was Carlos Alberto Torres, the “Great Captain” of the victorious 1970 World Cup. And, at one point, Carlos Alberto, who was about to transfer to the New York Cosmos in the United States— and would later become a football coach—came out with a cliché then popular in Brazil: “the ball is what goes around.”

It was a concept drawn from the writings of playwright Nélson Rodrigues, a great creator of phrases but who understood nothing about football: he said that Europeans had “the health of a prize-winning cow” and were in possession of a “dumb speed.”

According to that philosophy, Brazil had made the Europeans “run around” in 1970, forcing them to chase the ball all over the pitch while our players, cleverly, passed it around from one to the other.

Upon hearing Carlos Alberto repeat the concept, I dared to ask: “And why not have the ball go around and the players as well?”

This conversation, my friends, took place 50 years ago. But when I read the Brazilian newspapers about the Libertadores Cup Final, now at the end of 2025, I noticed that the notion is still being debated.

As the old announcer used to say, “time goes by”…