Let's Talk About Santos FC

Arthur Viana, 26th October 2021

Santos Futebol Clube or simply Santos, is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) football clubs in Brazil. A club with an enormous history, where multiple legends played, from Pelé and Coutinho in the 60s, and Neymar in the early 2010s. Santos was always known for forming incredible youngsters, Rodrygo and Kaio Jorge are some of the most recent names to go to Europe, Rodrygo is with Real Madrid since 2019 and Kaio went to Juventus in the beginning of 2021. Santos was always known for having incredible players coming from their youth academy and this tradition hasn’t stopped.

In the past 20 years, Santos had some spectacular moments, they won the Brazilian League in 2002 and 2004, the Brazilian Cup in 2010 and the Copa Libertadores in 2011. Even when they didn’t win titles, they always went far in every competition. Santos is currently one of the 3 clubs from Brazil that have never been relegated from the first division, but they’re going through a tough time nowadays.

The real problem is with the club’s past administrations. Every time the Club President changed, they brought more debt came for the club, to the point where became sort of a pattern in the past few years. They’ve sold players for huge amounts of money, but the money was never there for them to use it. They bought players but couldn’t pay for them. Recently, they got a ‘transfer ban’ from FIFA and were prohibited of hiring players for a year as punishment for not paying the clubs from where they signed Yeferson Soteldo and Christian Cueva. Cueva who was the 2nd biggest signing in the club’s history, didn’t last a season and went to court to leave the club. The last club president got impeached, and in 2020 they announced the return of Robinho (for the fourth time in his career), but he was responding for rape accusations and when sponsors threatened the club saying that they would leave, the deal with Robinho was broken.

The beginning of the 2021 season was worrying. Santos had a team mostly based on players who were just promoted from the youth academy because of the transfer ban, so their squad was theoretically getting weaker because of the lack of experience. The club had hired a new coach for the season, the Argentinean Ariel Holan, who quit after 12 games in charge after receiving threats from some supporters about the bad results. These supporters seemed to forget that Holan had to play a 16-year-old since he had no other options in the squad.

In the middle of the season, the situation is making the fans even more preoccupied. As I’m writing, Santos got eliminated from every competition they were in, and are occupying the 17th spot in the League, that is the first relegation spot. They hired Fernando Diniz as the new manager, the team showed glimpses of good football, but he was sacked after a little over three months in charge, Afterwards, they hired Fábio Carille, a manager that’s known for making teams playing very defensively, the opposite of Fernando’s game, based on quick passes and a lot of movement. This just shows the lack of planning we were afraid to keep seeing.

It’s very hard to tell what is going to happen at Santos. Last season their financial situation was similar, but against all odds they managed to play the Copa Libertadores Final, and although they lost, that campaign was seen as a miracle. For this season, they sold their best defender, Lucas Veríssimo, and their best attacker, Soteldo. With Carille not being able to fix the team and the lack of options in the market in case they sack him, things are not looking good for Santos. We can only hope that such a big part of football history such as Santos can recover from these bad times.