Manoel Garrincha

Stockholm, June 1958, the World Cup final against Sweden. Brazil had won, the players were celebrating, and someone told Garrincha that they were now world champions. He is said to have asked when the return leg would be played. The story may have been embellished in the retelling, but nobody who knew him ever doubted it was possible, and that is the essential fact about Manuel Francisco dos Santos: he was among the greatest footballers who ever lived and he never once appeared to understand what that meant, or to want anything from it. Born in 1933 in Pau Grande, a factory village in the hills outside Rio, he arrived in professional football with a body that should have disqualified him: a spine curved by congenital deformity, a misaligned pelvis, and a left leg six centimetres shorter than the right, bent inward. Botafogo signed him at nineteen anyway, and those defects produced a centre of gravity and a sequence of movement that no defender in the world could read. His dribbling was the most effective ever performed on a football pitch — a feint of the body followed by a change of direction that could not be anticipated because it did not obey the mechanics anyone else's legs obeyed. He was explosive over five metres, crossed with power and precision off the run, struck free kicks and corners with genuine quality, and possessed a hard, accurate shot; he scored close to 250 goals in twelve seasons at Botafogo, a total no traditional winger approaches. He won three Campeonatos Cariocas and multiple Rio–São Paulo tournaments, and with Brazil he won the World Cups of 1958 and 1962. In Chile in 1962, after Pelé was injured in the second match, Garrincha simply carried the team: goals and performances in the quarter-final against England and the semi-final against the hosts that remain among the most dominant individual tournaments in the competition's history. Across 50 caps, Brazil lost only once with both him and Pelé on the pitch. His football contained no discipline of any kind, and it was a genuine cost as well as the source of everything. Garrincha did not track back, did not press, and had no interest in tactical instruction; coaches who attempted to give him positional responsibilities were listened to politely and ignored. He was known to beat a defender, wait for him to recover, and beat him again rather than cross, prolonging a duel his team needed him to end — a habit that produced spectacle at the direct expense of efficiency. He was largely ineffective in matches where he was doubled and denied space to isolate a full-back, offered nothing away from his flank, and his conditioning was casual: his knees deteriorated badly from his early thirties, and after surgery in 1964 the acceleration that made the dribble lethal never fully returned. What made him unmanageable was not rebellion but a complete absence of the machinery that ambition requires. Garrincha appeared to feel no pressure at all — he was reportedly asleep in the dressing room before World Cup matches, joked with opponents he had just humiliated, and treated the biggest occasions of his life as indistinguishable from a game in Pau Grande, where he continued to return and play for the factory team while a world champion. He was gentle and entirely without malice: he did not retaliate against defenders who kicked him throughout matches, argued with referees almost never, and was cautioned rarely in a career spent as the most fouled player on any pitch he occupied. Teammates adored him without exception. He was also naive in a way that proved catastrophic — he signed contracts he had not read, gave money away as fast as it arrived, understood nothing of his own commercial value, and was exploited by nearly everyone who handled his affairs. He was drawn constantly to the informal life of Rio, to company and music and women, fathering a large number of children across several relationships, and he never developed the slightest capacity to organise any of it. He simply lived from one afternoon to the next, and when the knees went and the money was gone there was no plan underneath, because there had never been one. He died in 1983, at forty-nine, and Brazil buried him at Pau Grande under an epitaph he had earned twice over: aqui descansa em paz aquele que foi a alegria do povo. Joyful, ruinous and utterly irreplaceable, Garrincha played football as though it had been invented for his amusement, and for a decade it very nearly had been.