The Spectator and the Legendary Sócrates

The Spectator and the Legendary Sócrates

One of the greatest pieces of League of Ireland trivia is the ‘fact’ that Brazilian World Cup star Sócrates briefly played for UCD. The story goes that the famous midfielder and star of the 1982 World Cup studied medicine at UCD and turned out on occasion for the football team. This delightful and unlikely tale has been repeated often enough to have entered the folklore of the league and, though unsubstantiated, it is often taken as fact. And in these glorious days of Wikipedia and internet forums it is increasingly difficult to work out what indeed is fact and what’s a load of Bohemian FC accounts.
Quite where the Socratic rumour began is lost in the mists of time, but it seems to be doing the rounds for a good couple of decades. Variations on the rumour have Sócrates unable to break into the first team because he was too much of a fancy dan, playing for DCU, DIT, the Royal College of Surgeons or Shelbourne, or my personal favourite, that he won a Sigerson Cup medal with UCD in Gaelic football.
The story gained legs when it made its way to the Guardian newspaper’s wonderful online trivia page, The Knowledge , in 2000. An Irish correspondent casually threw open the question of whether Sócrates had ever played in the League of Ireland. The normally reliable Guardian reporters made a fatal error in their attempts to answer the question.... they contacted the Football Association of Ireland. An FAI press flunky of the time, Brendan McKenna, helpfully replied with the information that “Sócrates did play for UCD, but it was way, way back, sometime in the 70s. He was an attraction at the time, but it was before he played for the Brazilian team. He wouldn't have played much more than a season.” Wonderful! There we have it, proof from an irrefutable source, one would like to think, the national football association of the relevant country! Surely if the FAI says so, it has to be true! Further evidence was garnered some time later when the question was followed up in the Guardian. Another contributor suggested that Sócrates only played a couple of games because “the coach and manager at the time, Dr Terry O'Neill (sic), insisted that he quit smoking”. ‘Dr Terry O’Neill’ was presumably some sort of imagined amalgam of UCD supremo Dr Tony O’Neill and former Arsenal manager Terry Neill.
Despite considerable anecdotal evidence, and the despite the testimony of the FAI, some nagging doubt remained. Surely there must be some photo, matc h report or programme out there featuring Sócrates or at least some variant of his rather magnificent full name, Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira?
The rumour eventually made its way as far as Alex Bellos, author of the simply majestic history of Brazilian football ‘Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life’. Bellos employed a novel solution to the conundrum- he picked up the phone and gave Sócrates a bell. Had the great midfielder played League of Ireland football for UCD? We’re not sure what the Portuguese for “You wha’?” is, but it’s safe to say, that no, Sócrates had never so much as set foot in Ireland, never mind Belfield Park. While Sócrates is indeed a qualified and practicing medical doctor his degree was obtained in Sao Paolo, not Dublin. The legend of Sócrates at UCD was just that ... a legend.