The Brazilian pioneer of psychology in the 1958 World Cup and his controversial analysis of Pelé

In the 1958 World Cup, a 17-year-old Brazilian player surprised the world with his football.

In four games, he scored six goals — three of them in the semifinals. And two in the final, with Brazil winning the coveted world title for the first time.

Pele arrived in Sweden for the World Cup as a rookie and left as an immortal sporting idol. But one Brazilian defended that he not play in the tournament: Professor João Carvalhaes, the team’s psychologist.

In stark contrast to his colleagues today (whose work is usually limited to supporting the performance and mental health of the players), Carvalhaes had a concrete influence over the selection of the team. And Pelé’s results in the psychotechnical tests applied by Carvalhaes generated his somewhat dubious orientation, which was ignored at the time.

Pele later commented on the psychologist’s methods, saying that “either this was something way ahead of his time in football or it was just invention, maybe both”.

But Carvalhaes undoubtedly has its place in the history of the sport’s pioneers. He introduced psychology laboratories to Brazilian football almost 30 years before the adoption of this concept in Europe.

The trauma of Brazil in the World Cups

In fact, 1950s Brazil wanted all the help it could get. After all, the campaigns of the Brazilian team in the 1950 and 1954 World Cups had been harrowing.

The defeat in the 1950 final to Uruguay at Maracanã shook the country. And the 1954 tournament in Switzerland ended in embarrassment for the national team, reduced to nine players in a 4-2 quarter-final defeat to Hungary — a game marked by violence that became known as “the Battle of Bern”.

As the team tried to overcome the emotional trauma, a little-known psychologist was making his way into national football. João Carvalhaes was hired by São Paulo in 1957, after working at the referee school of the São Paulo Football Federation (FPF).

The club’s interest was stimulated by the psychology laboratory he had created at the FPF. Similar structures would only be seen in Europe in the late 1980s, with the Milan team’s “Thought Room” in Italy.

This laboratory was installed at the Federation’s headquarters and performed ten tests to examine cognitive functions, such as stereoscopic vision (depth perception). Carvalhaes used the tests to help highlight the techniques that refereeing students would need to develop in order to referee professional games.

Carvalhaes set standards for each variable examined and candidates with scores below a specific threshold were considered unable to whistle. In the “reaction time test”, for example, candidates who had a response of more than 50 hundredths of a second failed.

In addition to being a psychologist, Carvalhaes was a journalist and worked as a commentator specializing in boxing, becoming known as João do Ringue. But, contrary to what his pseudonym might indicate, Carvalhaes’ professional conduct was one of reflection, according to his former colleague, the psychologist José Glauco Bardella.

“You would arrive in the field and see everyone in that commotion and Carvalhaes quiet in a corner, with his hand on his chin or with both hands in his pocket, just watching,” Bardella told a documentary about Carvalhaes’ work produced by the Regional Council of Psychology of São Paulo in 2000.

He could just watch, but he was much more than a mere spectator. When São Paulo was champion of São Paulo in 1957, after four years without winning the title, Carvalhaes was acclaimed for his participation in the team’s lineup, which ended up being fundamental for São Paulo’s conquest.

The club’s director of football, Manoel Raimundo Paes de Almeida, said that the decision to replace the starting midfielder Ademar with the reserve Sarará – who shone in the final game against Corinthians – was taken based on Carvalhaes’s concerns about his psychological state. from Ademar.

A year later, the Brazilian Sports Confederation (CBD), which directed Brazilian football at the time, summoned the psychologist. The then vice-president of the national entity, Paulo Machado de Carvalho, was in charge of the organization for the World Cup in Sweden and invited Carvalhaes to integrate the technical commission of the selection. The offer was irrefutable.

Work for the Cup

The preparation of the Brazilian team had already begun and Carvalhaes hurried to implement the methods he had used at São Paulo. During the team’s concentration before the Cup, in Poços de Caldas (MG), he performed the so-called Alfa Army test, adapted from an American program designed to determine the intellectual capacity of soldiers in the First World War.

The alpha form of the test lasted 50 minutes and determined the players’ vocabulary and arithmetic skills in order to assign an “intelligence rating”. Those considered less capable did the beta form, which included exercises such as filling in incomplete drawings and sketching paths in two-dimensional mazes.

The concepts behind these tests may seem outdated with contemporary psychological theory, but at the time, they forced participants to think, even more so in a sport that had seen little or no psychology-based intervention.

Carvalhaes presented his conclusions to the CBD’s technical committee. The results ended up leaking to the press, much to the psychologist’s annoyance. In a letter to Paulo Machado de Carvalho, Carvalhaes stated that the documents had been stolen from his luggage.

This leak generated insinuations that Garrincha, star of the team that had bad results in the test, would not be able to play in the World Cup. Carvalhaes was furious. The negative impact of the public hampered his work behind the scenes.

But the storm was short-lived. After Garrincha was confirmed in the Brazilian team, press speculation ended and Carvalhaes traveled to Sweden with the rest of the coaching staff.

He continued to work with players, using myokinetic psychodiagnostic (PMK) tests to analyze individual characteristics and define his work according to the results. These tests — in which players were given a blank sheet of paper to draw whatever they wanted — were based on the theory that expressive muscle movements can help reveal an individual’s temperament.

Carvalhaes was again applying techniques that had never been employed at this level of the game. And again, he ran into trouble.

controversial reactions

In the book “Pelé – A Autobiografia”, Pelé tells the following passage: “As part of our preparations, the team psychologist, Dr. João Carvalhaes, had tested all the players. We needed to make drawings of people and answer questions — which, in theory, would help Dr. João to make assessments about whether we should be cast or not. […] As for me, the psychologist concluded that I should not be cast: ‘Pele is obviously childish. He lacks the necessary fighting spirit.”

Pele continues: “He also gave an opinion against Garrincha, who was not considered responsible enough. Fortunately, for me and for Garrincha, the [Vicente] Feola [técnico da seleção brasileira na Copa de 1958] He was always guided more by his instincts than by the advice of experts.”

“He just shook his head gravely, saying: ‘You may be right. The problem is that you don’t understand anything about football. If Pele’s knee is good, he plays!'” concluded the King.

Carvalhaes’ work had a “clairvoyance that can be found at the roots of current sports science”.

But other players had a more positive impression. Goalkeeper Gilmar, who was also interviewed for the 2000 documentary about Carvalhaes’ work, claimed he gave players the chance to use ideas “that would improve our performance”. And he added: “we only came to know after [da Copa] that it worked”.

The side Nilton Santos said that the team learned to “enter the field smiling” and reports of the Brazilian press after the conquest of the World Cup speak in a consensus on the importance of the role of Carvalhaes.

But, unfortunately, CBD was less willing to praise him, and this stance came at an emotional cost for someone as reflective as Carvalhaes. “He was very hurt because Paulo Machado de Carvalho made inappropriate comments about his work and that hurt him a lot”, according to José Glauco Bardella.

But he was starting to get attention. Bardella says that Carvalhaes received requests for interviews from magazines in Spain, France and Germany — and the American Sports Illustrated also highlighted his collaboration with the Brazilian team.

International recognition helped to lessen Carvalhaes’ frustration. And perhaps it paved the way for important professionals of the future, such as Bruno Demichelis, renowned former Milan sports scientist, to advance the use of psychology in elite football.

The legacy

Carvalhaes died in 1976, at the age of 58, just two years after his retirement. He had returned to work at São Paulo after the World Cup in Sweden, leaving his post with the national team to resume work at the club that helped to project his name.

Back in the relative protection of national football, Carvalhaes managed to introduce new ideas, such as individual counseling sessions for players, in addition to the cognitive tests that made him famous.

He worked at São Paulo until 1974, except for a brief return to boxing in 1963, when he offered psychological support to Brazilian fighters who competed in that year’s Pan American Games in São Paulo.

The American Coleman Griffith (1893-1966) is recognized worldwide as the first sports psychologist, but his work was more restricted to American football. Carvalhaes implemented methods never before seen in professional football — and with great success.

If he helped form the foundations of contemporary sports psychology, CBD — perhaps by dint of his willingness to consider all possible options for winning the World Cup — also helped. If the entity had not run the risk of recruiting a psychologist who had only worked for São Paulo a single season before being hired for the national team, Carvalhaes’ work probably would not have been so recognized.

But to this day, providing psychologists at training camps — except for youth teams, as many English clubs, for example, are required to provide psychological support to these younger players — remains far from the norm.

“Psychology is accepted in football clubs to varying degrees,” according to manager and entrepreneur Simon Clifford, who headed the sports science department at English club Southampton in the early 2000s.

“Some [clubes] will have psychologists working closely with their starters, while others will have managers who take on the role of head psychologist and don’t want players to see professional psychologists on a daily basis unless there is a problem,” he says. “It’s like when clubs started to adopt physical conditioning and weight training. It took some time for professionals in these areas to gain the trust of the core teams. And in psychology, we’re still at the beginning.”

Clifford is confident that “the time will come” when psychologists and coaching teams will work together in harmony, in part due to the influence of players’ mental state on their performance.

He believes that while some of Carvalhaes’ work can be considered “incipient by today’s standards”, there was also a “clairvoyance that can be found at the roots of current sports science”. And he adds: “the role played by psychology in elite football is enormous.”

“As Bill Beswick [ex-psicólogo da seleção nacional inglesa] once said, ‘The mind is the athlete. The body is simply the means’.”