In mid-1985, the implementation of the Folha Project made the newspaper a boiling environment. With Otavio Frias Filho heading the editorial team, Sheet adopted new procedures, which sought to make the newspaper more objective, concise and plural, among other goals.
During a meeting, Carlos Eduardo Lins da Silva, then Editorial Secretary, launched a provocation at sociologist Antonio Manuel Teixeira Mendes, the first director of Datafolha, a research institute that had been created two years earlier. As North Americans do with basketball, baseball and other sports, we can’t extract football statistics?, asked the journalist.
Teixeira Mendes accepted the challenge. He determined that a Datafolha team – at least five people at this initial moment, he remembers – would begin to be trained to take into account the fundamentals not only of each team during a match, but of each player. The researchers would record the number of shots and headers on goal, passes, crosses, dribbles, fouls and many other items.
After some tests, it was time to take the statistics to the newspaper pages. The debut took place in the two games of the 1985 Campeonato Paulista final, the duel between São Paulo and Portuguesa, scheduled for the 15th and 22nd of December.
In the December 16 edition, the numbers appeared in a discreet box on the last page of the Sports section (see below). Among the data, headers on goal and tackles, divided only by team.
In the December 23rd edition, which highlighted the title won by São Paulo, the data appeared with more prominence and detail. Two large boards displayed the performances of the teams and their players. Readers learned, for example, that left winger Sidney had been the champion team’s greatest dribbler, with eight dribblers throughout the match.
At that moment, the Sheet became a pioneer in the Brazilian press by bringing statistical analyzes to journalism dedicated to football. Until then, data collection, carried out with methodological rigor, was not used to explain the performance of a team or a player.
“It was revolutionary because no one did that in Brazil,” says Teixeira Mendes. “The newspaper showed that it was possible to have more objectivity in this area.”
Negative reactions soon came from journalists from other outlets and also from members of the Barão de Limeira editorial team. “They thought that football was only linked to passion and opinion, it was not something that could be quantified”, remembers Lins da Silva. He says that he overcame internal resistance alongside names such as the then Assistant Editorial Secretary, Luiz Caversan; the Sports editor, Marcelo Fagá, who died in 2003; and journalist Flávio Gomes.
Six months after that Paulista final, the World Cup in Mexico began. The edition of June 2, 1986, with coverage of the team’s first game, demonstrated that the newspaper had, in fact, changed the way it followed the sport.
The independent and provocative spirit advocated by Projeto Folha was already clear in the headline: “Brazil beats Spain with help from the judge”. Sent to Guadalajara, reporters Carlos Brickmann and Ricardo Kotscho wrote that coach Telê Santana’s team had woken up “after the Spanish put a ball in Brazil’s goal – which referee Christopher Bambridge did not give”.
“The newspaper received a flood of letters of complaint”, recalls Lins da Silva about the demonstrations of readers who pointed out a lack of patriotism in the Sheet.
In that edition, there was still a variety of statistical approaches to the two teams. A table broke down each athlete’s performance into 14 items and, in a diagram, arrows showed the teams’ most frequent attack movements.
A Sheet it also published the World Cup 86 Ranking – First Phase, which showed the possibilities of each team moving to the next phase according to the team’s productivity index in previous matches.
What was this index? Another new feature presented by the newspaper that year was an indicator obtained through a formula. A team’s attacks, its opponent’s mistakes and fouls received were added together. This total was divided by the sum of errors made by that team and the fouls committed by it.
The method had been developed in the early 1980s by Luis Eduardo Salvucci Rodrigues, then a psychology student at USP in Ribeirão Preto, in partnership with his professor Marco Antonio Figueiredo de Castro. Rodrigues’ experience as a psychology intern at Botafogo in the interior of São Paulo had contributed to them arriving at the final model.
“Initially, we thought about the categories that we could analyze during the games to have a graph of the team’s performance. From then on, it took months of study”, says Rodrigues four decades later. Detailed in an article published in the Brazilian Archives of Applied Psychology in 1982, the method was presented to the newspaper four years later and approved by the research institute.
Obtaining this information to compose the index required speed and precision from a team of ten Datafolha researchers in action during the 90 minutes – they had been trained by Rodrigues. This data was then given the form of text and graphics by journalists from the Sports and Art editorial departments. It was like that in all 52 games of that World Cup.
The successful use of statistics by the newspaper during this World Cup was insufficient for the resource to become widely accepted by journalists.
At that time, all World Cup games were televised, which was not the case with the Brazilian and São Paulo championship matches. In disputes without broadcast, Datafolha researchers needed to go to the stadiums to record the data, which was not always a trivial activity.
At the turn of the 1980s into the 1990s, the dissatisfaction of Aceesp (Association of Sports Chroniclers of the State of São Paulo), responsible for providing the credentials that allow the press access to specific areas of a stadium, became evident. “Some of the Aceesp journalists lobbied for us not to have the credentials. So, we bought tickets and went to work among the fans”, recalls Fábio Tura, who was Datafolha’s sports coordinator from 1991 to 2015.
The veto was short-lived. Over the years, statistical analysis began to be recognized by TV and radio stations and even by other newspapers. Datafolha was hired by the São Paulo Football Federation (FPF) and teams such as Palmeiras and São Paulo to provide detailed information about games and athletes – later, entities and large clubs created their own data centers.
This Datafolha work resulted in the formation of a broad database, fundamental, for example, in the research work for books such as “A História do Campeonato Paulista” (1997), by journalists Valmir Storti and André Fontenelle.
FolhaStats
For this World Cup, the newspaper launched FolhaStats, which brings together data on players and teams, tactical readings and other topics.
The service will have an open WhatsApp group (to join, click here and sign up), where readers will receive statistical cards and texts from columnists about the tournament. Until June 11th, when the World Cup begins, FolhaStats will focus on preparing the teams and the characteristics of the athletes called.
With the start of the World Cup, it will also bring complete statistics from each of the 104 games, before and after the matches. Subscribers will have access to services created especially by DeltaFolha, the newspaper’s editor specializing in data analysis.
