By Jack Lang
The tears came down and so did the projectiles, tossed at nobody in particular but succinctly conveying their message.
There were cups and flip-flops, plastic chairs ripped up from the floor, even the odd toilet seat. Half an hour after the final whistle, as the tear gas mixed with smoke from burning cars, the pitch was dotted with hundreds of objects, an inventory of hurt and rage.
By that point, most of the fans had left the ground, to head home or to scuffle with the police outside. Those who remained made their voices heard for the final time.
“Time sem vergonha,” they chanted. Shameless team.
Scenes of this nature are not uncommon in Brazilian football. Emotions run high and frequently spill over. This, though, was a little different in tone. Supporters at the Vila Belmiro stadium were not lamenting any old defeat. They had just witnessed — been subjected to — something historic.
Their team, Santos, had been relegated from the top division for the first time since their foundation 111 years ago.
The shockwaves were felt far beyond the seaside town of the same name where the club is based in the state of Sao Paulo. Santos are not one of the biggest clubs in Brazil but they are certainly among the most traditional. One of the most beloved, too, thanks in large part to their indelible association with the great Pele, who won three World Cups for Brazil as a Santos player.
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“I never thought this would happen,” wrote Walter Casagrande, a former Brazil striker who has become a popular columnist. “This is a blow to everyone who loves football. Everyone has a soft spot for Santos.”
Pepe, a former team-mate of Pele’s and a Santos icon in his own right, could not disguise his disappointment. “I am incredulous,” he wrote on Instagram.
“I thought the gods of football would protect us.”
There is a line in the official Santos anthem that captures what the club means to those who follow it.
“It is the cause of all of my laughter, my tears and emotion,” it goes. “The flag on the mast represents history, a glorious past and present.”
The glorious past is beyond dispute. During the 1950s and especially the 1960s, Santos were the dominant force in the Brazilian game. Between 1961 and 1965, they won five consecutive national championships, two Copa Libertadores titles, two Intercontinental Cups and four state championships — a staggering run of success that will never be matched.
Pele won three World Cups with Brazil as a Santos player (Mario Tama/Getty Images).
The exploits of that team have taken on a mythical quality, both at home and further afield. For years, they toured the world to play exhibition games, pitching up in Bangkok and Boston, Port-au-Prince and Plymouth. Santos became something like a travelling advertisement for Brazil itself, the players cast as ball-juggling happiness envoys.
Santos also fed the Brazil national team. There was Pele, of course, but also Pepe, Zito, Coutinho, Clodoaldo, Carlos Alberto, Mauro Ramos. Seven of the 22 players who won the World Cup in 1962 played their football at the Vila Belmiro. Fans of other clubs did not just admire Santos; they were grateful to them.
Success has been intermittent in the decades since — they have won two national titles and one Copa Libertadores since 1968 — but this is no great scandal given the relative size of the club (the Vila Belmiro holds just 16,000 people and national surveys generally rank their fanbase as the 12th largest in the country). Besides, supporters could always point to the constant stream of quality players emerging from the Santos academy.
Robinho, Neymar and Rodrygo are just three of the more recent names to have cemented the club’s reputation as an elite talent factory.
All of which is to explain the outrage expressed on Wednesday evening, when a 2-1 defeat against Fortaleza condemned Santos to the second division. “A crime against global football heritage,” Casagrande called it, capturing the mood.
Santos have produced stars including Neymar, seen here at their stadium this year (Miguel Schincariol/AFP via Getty Images).
Crimes, of course, have perpetrators, and while there is plenty of blame to go around, club president Andres Rueda is coming under particular scrutiny. Since he took charge at the start of 2021, Santos have become synonymous with muddled thinking, short-termism and a scattershot recruitment policy.
Mid-table finishes in 2021 and 2022 just about masked those failings but they were laid bare this year. Santos had four different coaches across the Serie A season, each of them wildly different from the one that went before.
Odair Hellmann could not arrest a slide that started with a shocking state championship campaign and ended with galling exits from the Copa do Brasil and Copa Sudamericana. Paulo Turra tried to instil some more discipline but succeeded only in falling out with Yeferson Soteldo, one of the few genuine stars in the squad. Turra’s replacement,
Diego Aguirre, lasted just five games.
The changes in tactics, methodology and staff clearly disrupted the team, as did the turnover in the playing squad. Santos made 21 signings in 2023. Only three of those who featured against Fortaleza were at the club last year. Five of the players who started the first game of the season aren’t around anymore. Some sales were unavoidable — talented youngsters Angelo Gabriel and Deivid Washington both left to join Chelsea — but there has been no continuity at all.
“It’s a weak squad,” says Bruno Lima, who covers Santos for the Trivela website. “The level has been really poor for a while. They spent a lot of money on bad players. Rueda simply doesn’t know how to run a football club. He doesn’t understand the game.”
That was most obvious in the first half of the season, when Santos claimed just 18 points from 19 games. There was a reaction under Marcelo Fernandes, promoted from assistant to interim coach in September, but the team seemed to run out of gas at the crucial moment, stumbling into the Fortaleza game off the back of heavy defeats to Fluminense and Athletico Paranaense.
“We will give our lives,” Fernandes insisted before Wednesday’s match. “Santos will not go down.” But, despite holding a points advantage over Vasco da Gama and Bahia at the start of the final round, they could not make good on that promise and were overtaken by both as they finished 17th in the 20-team league (the bottom four were relegated).
Manager Marcelo Fernandes failed to spark enough of a reaction after his appointment (Ricardo Moreira/Getty Images).
Rueda’s hours at the club are numbered. His term ends on Saturday, when presidential elections take place. That will provide some solace for the Santos supporters, as will all of Brazil’s top clubs, with the exception of Flamengo and Sao Paulo, having been relegated — and recovered well — this century.
Will Santos bounce straight back? There are reasons for pessimism. One is the state of the club’s finances: their mid-year accounts showed debts of 700million Brazilian Reais ($142m, £113m) and there is unlikely to be an uptick on that front now they are in the second division. The other is that the academy — for so long a comfort blanket — is becoming a source of concern.
“The youth system isn’t in great shape,” explains Lima. “The club hasn’t modernised. The academy has been overtaken by other clubs in Brazil — clubs who invest a lot more money in it and, as a result, produce a lot more players. There are no wonderkids ready to break through, as there always were in the past.”
Brazil’s Serie B is a long old slog. It will take Santos to sparsely populated stadiums on Sunday mornings, to pitches that look untended. Their players will spend eight months being kicked around by the grizzled veterans of the hinterland. There is no glamour there, only traps. Just ask Cruzeiro, who spent three miserable seasons trying to claw their way back to the top flight after relegation in 2019.
That is what could await Santos. Hence the projectiles and the burning cars. Hence the tears.
“The only consolation,” wrote newspaper columnist Juca Kfouri, “is that Pele is not around to see this.”