The Robinho experiment

(Other contributors: Adam Crafton and Jack Lang)

It was the look on Mark Hughes’ face that lingered in the memory. He was sitting behind his desk in the manager’s office, trying to catch his breath after the madness of the previous 24 hours, and occasionally looking up to the whiteboard where a new name had been added to Manchester City’s squad. “Robinho” was written in blue marker pen. And Hughes’ expression suggested that, no, he could hardly believe it either.

The previous day, City had their annual golf event at Worsley. They were raising money for the club’s academy when, somewhere on the back nine, Hughes took a call telling him he needed to put down his clubs and get to London as quickly as possible.

“I was playing in front of Mark Hughes,” Jim Cassell, then City’s academy director, says. “The rumours kept growing from tee to tee. Rumours of Dimitar Berbatov, then the takeover, then Robinho. They just kept coming. Everyone on that golf course — including, I would guess, Mark — knew the club would not be the same again.”

To understand why Robinho’s transfer sent so many reverberations throughout the sport, the first thing to bear in mind is that the player in question had a superstar status that once prompted Spain’s AS newspaper to run the headline, “And God Created Robinho!”

It was an era when, in many countries, Manchester United were referred to as simply “Manchester,” as if it wasn’t even common knowledge that a club called Manchester City existed. A banner was permanently in place at Old Trafford to poke fun at the fact City had not won a major trophy since the 1970s.

Everything changed on that seminal transfer deadline day — September 1, 2008 —when Abu Dhabi’s royal family took control of the club. Robinho was a statement signing, a symbol of a new, brighter future.

Sheikh Mansour had bought his way into English football and that evening his name was attached to an open letter, addressed to “dear fellow Manchester City fans”, to make it clear Robinho would be the first of many gifts.

Amid the madness of the night, with supporters turning up outside the stadium in makeshift Arab fancy-dress, what has never been reported until now is that when the moment came to send Real Madrid the all-important fax, completing a £32.5 million British record transfer, City put the paper through the wrong way up.

At the Madrid end, all that was received was a blank fax until the message went back to Manchester that they should try again, pronto.

Perhaps you might be familiar with the old phrase “Typical City”.

It went through properly the second time. Robinho became a City player, without even being required to take a medical, and the landscape of English football changed.

“It was a moment,” Garry Cook, City’s chief executive at the time, says.

Robson de Souza — or Robinho, as he is better known — will always be remembered with fondness by Manchester City’s supporters. He will always be part of their story and, similar to Carlos Tevez and Mario Balotelli, nostalgia tends to be the file that smooths away the rough edges.

Various players and colleagues speak about him now, as they did then, with a certain reverence. They will say they have happy memories, that they thought of him as a good guy, with his heart in the right place and a sunrise of a smile.

Robinho went on to win 100 Brazil caps and it is difficult to overstate the impact it had on City’s dressing room to see that the club’s new owners could recruit one of the sport’s genuine superstars.

Micah Richards was watching the drama unfold live on rolling sports news channels. “In the end, I fell asleep and just after midnight a mate rang me and said, ‘We’ve signed Robinho’. I thought I was still dreaming and said, ‘Yeah, whatever’. I mean, Robinho was the kind of player you would usually only pick for City if you were playing a computer game.”

“It was like an out-of-body experience,” Nedum Onuoha, Richards’ team-mate at the time, says. “This was a top-tier player joining the club when, at the start of the day, there hadn’t even been a discussion about someone like that coming in. I thought, ‘Wow, someone who I watched for Real Madrid is going to be my team-mate’. All of a sudden, bang, it had happened. And you knew that, going in the next day, it was going to feel like a brand new club. That was when people started to understand this was a serious project.”

It all goes back to Robinho. “A day that had commenced with a fairly low level of anticipation ended with my head buzzing,” Gary James, the Manchester football historian and author, says. “City were suddenly perceived as the richest club in the country, possibly the world, and had broken the transfer record to sign a world-renowned player.”

Yet there is another side to the Robinho story that, until now, has never fully been explored and features all sorts of alleged misdemeanours, occasional fake fines (more of that later) and the sense, ultimately, that he was part of a learning curve for a club with City’s ambitions.

It involves one key member of City’s staff telling The Athletic they could never be totally sure if they trusted the player. They wanted to believe he was fully committed when there was a stack of evidence to suggest that was not the case.

In the worst moments, influential people at City were left wondering whether he was, in the language of one, “a dressing-room terrorist”. It is a term that is used in football to describe a player who will smile at the manager, say all the right things but then work behind the scenes to undermine him. And, at the very least, Robinho’s former colleagues are probably entitled to question whether his heart was ever really in it.

He had, after all, never intended to join City in the first place. He was meant to sign for Chelsea and team up with Luiz Felipe Scolari, formerly his manager with the Brazil national team. The player had checked out of Real Madrid, said his goodbyes and was booked on a private jet to London when Cook set about trying to ambush the deal.

It was audacious on Cook’s part bearing in mind Chelsea, bankrolled by Roman Abramovich, had won the Premier League in two of the previous four seasons, finishing as runners-up on the other two occasions, and were regarded as the most financially endowed club on the planet. But it turned out City’s new owners were not short of a bob or two either. They had made it a condition of the takeover, written into the paperwork, that City signed an elite player to usher in the new era.

Cook had another thing in his favour: a mocked-up picture of Robinho, wearing Chelsea’s kit, had appeared on the London club’s website. Madrid were furious.

“Then the agent gods got to work,” Cook tells The Athletic.

Another private jet was arranged, still flying to London, and when Robinho touched down a delegation from City was waiting for him. His contract was signed in the offices that former owner Thaksin Shinawatra had rented in Old Park Lane near the casino, Les Ambassadeurs, where City’s executives liked to clink glasses and do business with deal-makers such as Kia Joorabchian and Pini Zahavi.

And, frankly, it did not matter to Cook, or any of his colleagues, that their new signing seemed more interested in the colour and the extent of the money rather than who was supplying it.

“I’m still not sure he knew he was going to end up, ultimately, in Manchester,” Cook says. “What he knew was that he was going to earn a lot of money playing for another team in the Premier League, whereas in Madrid he wasn’t getting game time. He was going to be a very wealthy man.”

Robinho quickly set about showing why, in Brazil, he was sometimes known as Pelezinho – Little Pele.

His debut came against Chelsea and the crowd was almost 11,000 higher than it had been for City’s previous home fixture. Twelve minutes in, City won a free kick within shooting distance. Robinho curled the ball beyond Petr Cech and English football had its first view of that famous thumb-sucking goal celebration.

By the turn of the year, it had become a regular sight. Robinho had accumulated 11 goals in the Premier League, putting him behind only Chelsea’s Nicolas Anelka in the scoring charts. Around 15,000 City shirts had been sold with his name across the back. A book — Robinho, King of the City — had been rushed out. Robinho oozed confidence. There was a touch of arrogance, too, as often was the case with the more exquisitely talented Brazilian footballers.

One goal, in particular, in a 3-0 win against Arsenal — a beautifully deft finish, on the run, to lift the ball over Manuel Almunia — was a peach.

This brilliant finish against @Arsenal is up there with @Robinho’s finest moments for the club. #mcfc pic.twitter.com/TpKVXXeDG0

— Manchester City (@ManCity) September 1, 2015

“I always remember that goal,” Glauber, one of City’s other Brazilians, tells The Athletic. “That finish was just something else. Robinho had that calmness in moments like that.

“I can also remember the Chelsea game. The sheikh was in town for the match and came to the hotel to see the players beforehand. Robinho told him, ‘I’m going to score, OK?’ The guy said, ‘If you do, I’ll give you a watch’. Robinho went and scored against Chelsea, then ran off, tapping his wrist as if to say, ‘I want that watch’. I’m pretty sure he did get it, too, some time later.”

Glauber, a centre-half with one Brazil cap, had signed for City the day before his compatriot.

“Robinho’s arrival was a big moment,” he says. “This was a special talent, someone who was known around the world. Manchester City were already evolving but he came to add a bit of sheen and sparkle to the project. From the moment he arrived, Robinho was the biggest player at the club. The English players never had a problem with that. There was no sense that they were put out. On the contrary, they were always happy to help out.”

Not everyone was thrilled. Pele questioned whether Robinho “needs counselling”. Marcelo Teixeira, the president of Santos, talked about “one of the most disgraceful episodes in Brazilian football”. In the country where Robinho grew up, there was disbelief, anger even, that the boy wonder had joined what the Brazilian media called “the wrong Manchester”.

But Robinho seemed genuinely happy. His parents, Gilvan and Marina, had joined him in Manchester. Robinho had his fiancee, Vivian, with him and his 11-month-old boy, Robson Jr, the inspiration behind his goal celebration. He even drew compliments from Sir Alex Ferguson before his first Manchester derby. “You say, ‘Well, £32.5 million, is it worth it?'” Ferguson said. “But you have to say yes, because he is producing something others can’t do.”

Robinho became a regular at the Pau Brasil restaurant in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. At the bars on Deansgate Locks, he was always ushered to the front of the queue. And he quickly made new friends.

In the canteen at City’s training ground, Robinho shared a table with Glauber and the club’s two other Brazilians, Elano and Jo. Felipe Caicedo would often join them. Caicedo was from Ecuador but it is remembered by one former member of staff as “the Samba table”.

“We had breakfast together every morning,” Glauber says. “We’d order our bread and eggs and talk about life, about football, about our experiences. It was always good to chat with him. I learnt from him, too, because he had been at Real Madrid and played with some of the greats.

“When I got to know him, I found he was a very unassuming person, despite all his achievements. He was a really humble guy who treated everyone he met in exactly the same way. He was driven, energetic, a top professional, a great kid to spend time with, a pleasure to be around. He had that glint in his eye that you see in children. His joy spread through the dressing room; it was positive and contagious.”

Elano was another Brazil international, older than Robinho by three years, and they hit it off straight away. “Him and Elano,” Onuoha recalls. “If they were on the same team (in training), that was basically the winning team. It didn’t matter what the drill was, those two were going to be the ones.”

Onuoha remembers Robinho as a “positive guy” and there is obvious affection in his voice. “Nutmegs, the ability to beat people… it was something we hadn’t seen before at the club.”

But Elano didn’t get on with Hughes. Elano was regarded by City’s management as a bit stroppy, a bit of a troublemaker, and had been fined for criticising Hughes in a television interview. He was angry about being left out of the team. Elano didn’t like Hughes, and vice versa, and that is worth keeping in mind given what happened next.

A dressing-room terrorist?

“Not Robinho,” Stephen Ireland says, with a shake of the head. “The big problem for Mark Hughes was they felt Elano was the one dealing with Robinho, poisoning him a little bit, throwing stuff at him. Elano was a very talented player. The only thing was he was a nightmare when he didn’t play. He wrecked training sessions.”

Even before Hughes came in as manager, Ireland had seen Elano’s less appealing side.

“We had a session with Sven-Goran Eriksson and Elano got fouled. In training, you don’t normally give fouls. It’s normally, ‘Oh come on, get up’ unless it’s a really stupid foul. Elano didn’t get the foul so he just lost his head, picked up the ball and volleyed it four fields away.

“He wrecked the whole session. He was kicking off at Eriksson, calling him all sorts of stuff. Then the other lads started getting heated. So, yeah, he (Elano) had that in his locker. Mark Hughes played him a lot but they were always worried he was having too much influence over Robinho.”

Kompany, who had joined the club 10 days before Robinho, had already told “the Samba table” their attitude had to improve.

Craig Bellamy, who signed the following January, went even further, accusing them of being cliquish and lazy. Robinho told Bellamy never to speak to him again.

As winter set in and the stepovers stopped being so effective, Hughes and his coaches became increasingly concerned about the deterioration in Robinho’s performances. In particular, they noted his habit of disappearing in away matches.

City’s management systematically looked at every match of Robinho’s first six months and concluded there was only one, when he scored a hat-trick against Stoke City, when it could realistically be said that the most expensive footballer in Britain had “carried” the team.

At the same time, they had identified a dozen or so games when Robinho had strayed dangerously close to being a passenger. In a 2-0 defeat at relegation-threatened Portsmouth, Robinho was so abject that a montage of his misplaced passes was shown on the television highlights. Yet four days earlier he had been outstanding for Brazil in a friendly against Italy.

Bellamy was so outraged he challenged Robinho in the dressing room, calling him “a fucking disgrace”. Bellamy was backed up by Kompany. Robinho didn’t back down and had his mates to take his side.

Today, a level of animosity still lingers.

“I can’t understand him, man,” Glauber says of Bellamy. “I don’t get his complaints. It seems like the Brazilian mindset — our happy outlook — grated on him. He was a really cold guy, so maybe our happiness got on his nerves. At the time, I didn’t stop to analyse him. But from what he has said since, I guess our positivity annoyed him.”

Bellamy was scathing in his autobiography. “They had formed a Brazilian clique and, as far as I could see, they didn’t give a shit,” he wrote. “They didn’t train with any intensity and if you tackled one of them it was like you had committed a crime.”

Bellamy writes in the book that the three Brazilians were glued together, with Elano was the voice for them. Robinho was viewed as the sheikh’s man and if you had a problem with him, you would have to take it up with the sheikh. He explains that Elano would boast to the group that if Robinho wanted something, he would get it. He also writes that if you had a disagreement with Elano, he would tell Robinho and Robinho would tell the sheikh.

Glauber has no time for Bellamy’s complaints and feels that was just envy on the part of the Welshman, who he felt was a jealous person. “He knew that someone with Robinho’s quality, playing on his side of the pitch, would take the spotlight away from him. So it was to be expected that he would feel a bit jealous. But he should think carefully about what he says. Someone with his status should be more measured with his words.

“Robinho came from Real Madrid where he played some magical football. The issue was that he had an ankle injury. Even then, he wanted to play. Robinho was a super professional but he was in pain, which limited him in a few games. He tried to stay out on the pitch as much as he could but he was really suffering.

“Bellamy didn’t understand that he was injured and wanted to have it out with him. It created a bad mood, a heavy feeling in the squad. He was being unfair because it’s the manager who makes the decision to play someone or not. If the manager thought Robinho could still play, it’s because he thought he needed him.”

Others say Hughes felt obliged to continue picking Robinho because he knew that was what City’s owners wanted and expected. Hughes wanted his players to give their all and Robinho’s request at one team meeting that his team-mates should do more running for him went down like a lead balloon.

Cracks were appearing. “Because they had the language connection, they could stick in a little group and not mingle too much,” Shay Given, City’s goalkeeper at the time, writes about the Brazilians in his autobiography. “I could understand why in a way. If I was in the middle of a different country and two or three other Irish fellas were in the squad I reckon it’s only natural I would have been drawn to them as mates, so I had no problem with it.

“They were all nice lads and they’d say hello to you when they first go in but you didn’t – or couldn’t – start a conversation with them because their English was pretty scratchy.”

Given had previously been at Newcastle United and Robinho reminded him of Tino Asprilla. “He was always messing about in training, doing tricks and flicks and stuff. He just never seemed that bothered. On match day we all wondered which Robinho was going to show up. We’d seen him play for Real Madrid and rip teams apart on his own. His head just wasn’t on it for most of the time, yet on some days he could do stuff with the ball that most people could only dream of.”

Off the pitch, it was also becoming apparent that Robinho was not always the “super professional” that his friends talk about.

In his only Christmas at the club, City arranged for the first-team squad to go ten-pin bowling with a group of disadvantaged children in Didsbury. Usually, they would visit one of the local hospitals to drop off presents. But that year they decided to do something a bit different and invited various television crews to film it. And, yes, you can probably guess where this is going. Only one player failed to show up: the player the kids wanted to see the most.

Robinho was meant to be doing a feature with BBC’s Football Focus and eventually someone went to his house to fetch him. He arrived just as the event was finishing.

A few weeks later, Hughes took City’s squad to Tenerife for a warm-weather training camp and found out, the hard way, that Robinho preferred to go through life with his own rules.

On the second day, the players were all supposed to meet at a certain time. There was no sign whatsoever of Robinho. Hotel staff said he had checked out and, to begin with, Hughes could not believe it was true. The players who knew Robinho best were adopting a code of omerta. Nobody knew where he was. Or, rather, nobody was willing to say.

“He’d gone,” one person on that trip recalls. “It was quite surreal. He was a very wealthy guy and he had the money to get on a plane and fly wherever in the world he wanted.”

Robinho had decided to go back to Brazil, reportedly for a mid-season holiday. It was someone’s birthday and he did not want to miss the party.

It also happened to be Bellamy’s first day at the club. He had signed from West Ham for £14 million and arrived in Tenerife to find “all hell had broken loose”.

They still remember the six-week period, early in 2009, when City’s first season of Abu Dhabi ownership started heading in an entirely unexpected direction.

Ched Evans, one of the club’s up-and-coming strikers, had been accused of accidentally shooting one of his friends in the leg with an air rifle. Ireland, City’s player of the year that season, was the subject of a £20,000 blackmail plot that ended with a man being sent to prison. And then the news came through that Robinho had been arrested on suspicion of rape.

The alleged incident happened on a Monday night in the VIP section of a Leeds nightclub called Space. Robinho strenuously denied the allegation and City staff were woken at 2.30am to hear that the police wanted to take him in and get a DNA test.

A week later, Micah Richards was arrested after an alleged fight outside a nightclub. Nothing ever came of it and he was not charged but City were starting to wonder what was coming next. When the call arrived from Stretford police station, one club official mistook the voice to be a colleague’s and, suspecting it was a wind-up, told the detective on the other end of the line to stick it where the sun doesn’t shine.

The case against Robinho was dropped but in his next away fixture he had to endure chants of “she said no” from the Stoke City crowd during a freezing 1-0 defeat that, it is fair to assume, must have felt a long way removed from those sweet-scented nights at the Bernabeu.

Inside the club, it had also hardened the perception of Robinho liking the party scene too much and staying too young too long.

One story from Madrid was of Robinho failing to return in time from a Brazil match because he and his team-mates had been at a nightclub until 5am. He was suspected when director, Predrag Mijatovic, complained that players were turning up for training reeking of booze (Robinho denied it was him). Robinho’s reputation was as a party animal and Manchester, if you remember the song, was the city of 24-Hour Party People.

“He wanted to play the game in a certain way, and he wanted to be professional in a certain way,” Onuoha says. “But Mark Hughes was quite strict and had a real plan of how he wanted players to be. Every day we would be doing hydration tests, we might be doing a finger-prick (blood) test to check our (match) recovery, health checks, all this stuff.

“Sports science was becoming a big part of the game. Robinho, as a Brazilian, was more of a free spirit. His vision of the game didn’t really suit that. Not in a sinister way, but it was a big change for him.  He brushed some people up the wrong way because of that. But that’s essentially who he was and I never saw him as a sinister person. Every time you saw him, he had a big smile on his face. He just wanted to go out and do his tricks and stuff.”

There were still times when a typical piece of Robinho magic might lead to a round of applause on the training ground. It was even known for his team-mates to break into an impromptu rendition of the chant “We’ve got Robinho”.

In those moments, he was a joy to watch. “Robinho could handle the ball in a telephone box,” one member of the backroom staff says. “In the dressing room before games, he would play head tennis over the medical table. His talent and skill… he could do things, tricks-wise, that would blow your mind.”

But there were little things Hughes could not let pass. The manager wanted his team to look smart and presentable when they travelled abroad and arranged for them to be measured for club suits. Robinho preferred to wear the jacket and trousers with white trainers, no tie, a peaked woolly hat and his shirt tucked out. He was told, repeatedly, that he had to abide by the same dress code as everybody else and, each time, he blamed language problems on not understanding what he was meant to wear, promising it would not happen again.

“The club paid for English lessons,” one former City official says. “I remember one day the English teacher was there. She was waiting in a private office at the training ground. Robinho had said he would do it. Then he got in his car and drove off. We literally watched him drive off down the little lane in Carrington. We were paying bills for English lessons that sometimes never happened.”

Behind the scenes, it was also noted that Robinho never seemed to misunderstand when he was told he had a day off.

“He was learning English, but it wasn’t great,” Onuoha says. “He was trying, to be fair to him. Other people have tried harder but, then again, there are lots of players who haven’t tried at all.

“The thing I remember, and all the staff will remember, is that he would try to complain in his broken English. ‘Every day piss test! Every day piss test!’ But he would say it with a smile on his face.”

Onuoha is laughing at the memory. “You say that line – ‘Every day piss test!’ – to any member of the staff, all the fitness coaches, and they will know what you are talking about.”

Some staff remember there were mornings when Robinho was late to training and other days in which he missed sessions altogether. For Hughes and his support team, they could only let it happen so many times.

The added problem for Hughes was that, politically, it was difficult for him to take on Robinho when the player was Abu Dhabi’s golden boy. Hughes had to think about the reaction at the top of the club, especially at a time when the team’s results were decent but not spectacular. A public row with Robinho was the last thing he needed.

Instead, he asked senior pros such as Richard Dunne to try to get through to Robinho. Staff were worried about the example being set to younger players and, within the club, took the unusual step of pretending that Robinho had been fined, so it sent out the message that misbehaviour would not be tolerated. The truth was, Robinho had not been fined at all.

Ultimately, though, his luck ran out when Hughes was sacked and Roberto Mancini took over.

“Mancini just wanted him out,” Ireland recalls matter-of-factly. “He didn’t like him and wanted him out of the door.”

By that stage, Elano had been sold to Galatasaray. Jo had been loaned to Everton and Glauber had returned to Brazil. Robinho had been left feeling isolated and not enjoying the experience of being in England. Initially, he had stayed at the Hilton on Deansgate. City then found a house for him in the Cheshire village of Mobberley and, on reflection, there was an acceptance within the club that it was a bad choice. Robinho’s problems extended to a dispute with neighbours over him playing Brazilian music.

One game in particular, a 2-0 defeat at Everton, summed up Mancini’s indifference to the player. Robinho had come on as a ninth-minute substitute for the injured Roque Santa Cruz but was then substituted himself on the hour-mark.

“He (Mancini) brought him on at Everton and then took him back off,” Ireland says. “Robinho felt so embarrassed, this being live on TV, he just got showered and headed off home.” Ireland believed he received a proper fine for that.

Mancini, unlike Hughes, was an Abu Dhabi appointment and therefore had more of a position of strength to get his own way.

“I wasn’t there when Mancini was the manager, so I don’t know exactly,” Glauber says. “But I do know that Robinho could have adapted to anything. He was a really intelligent player, who could have played wherever you asked him to. He grew up playing in the street in Santos, and on the beach, right? You don’t think he would find a way to adapt in away matches? Maybe it was some tactical decision by the coach, but Robinho could have played in any situation.”

Ireland, who has little affection for Mancini, can also sympathise. “Robinho was a lovely guy,” he says. “A good guy, with amazing ability. He loved playing at home. He didn’t really like playing away but there had to be an adjusting period. Just because of the fee and his name and the fact he was Brazilian it doesn’t mean he will adjust straight away. If he had gone to Chelsea or Arsenal he would have been shown a bit more patience than he did at Manchester City.”

It is an interesting point. Expectations were high. Football is an impatient business and the scrutiny on Robinho was always going to be intense because, at that time, he was the player who carried City’s hopes.

Could he have been more professional? “Robinho is a bundle of energy, but he liked being at home,” Glauber says. “He would invite his friends round for a barbecue or to play some pool. He was still in his early-20s in Manchester and he was always very excitable, very happy. He liked loud music — he had all this DJ equipment at his house — but he wasn’t out clubbing or drinking. He just liked having fun, creating a nice atmosphere. If people thought he was partying too much, I think they interpreted it wrong. He was always a good professional.”

And Robinho’s take? “There will always be jealousy,” he said in a 2014 interview with Placar magazine. “Not even Jesus pleased everyone.”

All that can really be said for certain is that it was clear to everyone after the Everton game that there was no way back. It doesn’t get much more humiliating for an elite footballer than to be a substituted substitute and, by his own admission, Robinho could not keep up with Mancini’s demands of tracking back, putting in the work, even in the supposedly easier games.

“In Brazil,” he explained, “you walk off at full-time after playing one of the smaller teams and you might not even be sweating.”

His form had dropped off a cliff, including a 17-game streak without scoring and then a 13-game one. A loan move to Santos was arranged and when that came to an end he moved to Milan for £15 million.

He played for Istanbul Basaksehir during the 2019-20 season but still has the mansion in Guaruja, the coastal town near Sao Paulo, where he pulled up the bottom of the swimming pool to replace it with a mosaic of his own autograph.

At Santos, they produced a Robinho doll to sell to fans. Robinho didn’t like it: “It’s ugly and looks nothing like me.” His house has its own nightclub, with sound-proofed walls. He is 36, still having fun, with magic in his feet and happiness in his soul. And, as far as City are aware, he has never set foot in Manchester again.

(Photo: ANDREW YATES/AFP via Getty Images)