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 much-desired world title for the first time.
Pelé arrived in Sweden for the World Cup as a rookie and left as an immortal sporting idol. But a Brazilian advocated that he not play in the tournament: Professor João Carvalhaes, the team’s psychologist.
In stark contrast to his current colleagues —whose role is usually limited to supporting players’ performance and mental health—, Carvalhaes had a concrete influence on the national team’s lineup.
And Pelé’s results in the psychotechnical tests applied by Carvalhaes generated his somewhat dubious guidance, which was ignored at the time.
Pelé later commented on the psychologist’s methods, saying that “either this was something well ahead of his time in football or it was nothing more than invention, perhaps both.”
But Carvalhaes undoubtedly has his place in the history of the sport’s pioneers. He introduced psychology laboratories to Brazilian football almost 30 years before the concept was adopted in Europe.
Brazil’s trauma in the World Cup
In fact, Brazil in the 1950s wanted all the help it could get. After all, the Brazilian team’s campaigns 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 shame for the team, reduced to nine players in a 4-2 defeat to Hungary in the quarter-finals — a game marked by violence that became known as “The Battle of Bern”.
While the team was trying to overcome the emotional trauma, a little-known psychologist was joining national football. João Carvalhaes was hired by São Paulo in 1957, after working at the São Paulo Football Federation (FPF) referee school.
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 “Thinking Room” in Italy.
This laboratory was installed at the Federation headquarters and carried out ten tests to examine cognitive functions, such as stereoscopic vision (depth perception). Carvalhaes used the tests to help highlight the techniques that arbitration course students would need to develop in order to officiate professional games.
Carvalhaes defined standards for each variable examined and candidates with scores below a specific threshold were considered incapable of blowing the whistle. In the “reaction time test”, for example, candidates who responded in 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, having become 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, also psychologist José Glauco Bardella.
“You would arrive at the field and see everyone in that commotion and Carvalhaes standing quietly in the corner, with his hand on his chin or with both hands in his pocket, just watching,” Bardella said in a documentary about Carvalhaes’ work produced by the São Paulo Regional Psychology Council in 2000.
He could just watch, but he was much more than a mere spectator. When São Paulo became champions 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 to São Paulo’s victory.
The club’s football director, Manoel Raimundo Paes de Almeida, stated that the decision to replace starting midfielder Ademar with reserve Sarará — who shone in the final game against Corinthians — was taken based on Carvalhaes’ concerns about Ademar’s psychological state.
A year later, the Brazilian Sports Confederation (CBD), which governed Brazilian football at the time, summoned the psychologist. The then vice-president of the national entity, Paulo Machado de Carvalho, was in charge of organizing the World Cup in Sweden and invited Carvalhaes to join the team’s technical committee. The offer was irrefutable.
Working for the World Cup
The preparation of the Brazilian team had already begun and Carvalhaes hurried to implement the methods he had used in São Paulo.
During the team’s concentration before the World Cup, in Poços de Caldas (MG), he carried out the so-called Army Alpha 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 players’ vocabulary and arithmetic ability 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 relative to contemporary psychological theory, but at the time, they forced participants to think, especially in a sport that had seen little to no psychological-based interventions.
Carvalhaes presented his conclusions to the CBD technical committee. The results ended up being leaked 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 led to insinuations that Garrincha, the star of the team that had poor test results, would not be able to play in the World Cup. Carvalhaes was furious. The negative impact of the public undermined 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 their 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 once again applying techniques that had never been employed at this level of the game. And again, he faced problems.
Controversial reactions
In the book “Pelé – The Autobiography”, Pelé tells the following passage:
“As part of our preparations, the team’s psychologist, Dr. João Carvalhaes, had carried out tests with all the players. We needed to draw pictures of people and answer questions — which, in theory, would help Dr. João make assessments about whether we should be selected or not. […] As for me, the psychologist concluded that I shouldn’t be cast: ‘Pelé is obviously childish. He lacks the necessary fighting spirit.”
Pelé continues: “He also gave an opinion against Garrincha, who was not considered responsible enough. Fortunately, for me and Garrincha, the [Vicente] Meat [técnico da seleção brasileira na Copa de 1958] He always let himself be guided more by his instincts than by the advice of experts.”
“He just shook his head gravely, saying: ‘You might be right. The problem is that you don’t understand anything about football. If Pelé’s knee is good, he’ll play!'” concluded the King.
Carvalhaes’ work had a “clairvoyance that can be found in the roots of today’s sports science”.
But other players had a more positive impression. Goalkeeper Gilmar, who was also interviewed for the 2000 documentary about Carvalhaes’ work, said he gave players the chance to use ideas “that would improve our performance”. And he added: “we only found out later [da Copa] that it worked.”
Full-back Nilton Santos said that the team learned to “enter the field smiling” and reports in the Brazilian press after winning the World Cup speak of a consensus on the importance of Carvalhaes’ role.
But, unfortunately, CBD was less willing to praise him and this stance had an emotional cost for someone reflective like 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 attract attention. Bardella says that Carvalhaes received interview requests from magazines in Spain, France and Germany, and the American Sports Illustrated also highlighted his collaboration with the Brazilian team.
International recognition helped ease 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 position with the national team to resume work at the club that helped create his name.
Back in the relative protection of national football, Carvalhaes was able 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 competing in that year’s Pan American Games in São Paulo.
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 it helped form the foundations of contemporary sports psychology, CBD — perhaps because of the willingness to consider all possible options for winning the World Cup — also helped.
If the entity had not taken the risk of calling on a psychologist who had only worked for São Paulo a single season before being hired for the national team, Carvalhaes’ work would probably not have been so recognized.
But to this day, offering psychologists at training camps except at youth level, as many clubs are required to provide psychological support to these younger players, remains far from the standard.
The 2026 World Cup, for example, is the first in which the Brazilian men’s team counts on the work of a professional to assist with athletes’ psychological issues on a daily basis.
Marisa Santiago, who has already played for Brazilian clubs, was hired in 2024 by the CBF to work as the team’s psychologist. Psychologists have already served the team in previous years, but only carried out specific work.
“Psychology is accepted at football clubs to varying degrees,” according to coach and businessman 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 lead psychologist and don’t want players to see professional psychologists on a daily basis unless there is a problem,” according to him.
“It’s like when clubs started adopting physical conditioning and weight training. It took some time for professionals in these areas to gain the trust of the main teams. And, in psychology, we are still at the beginning.”
Clifford is confident that “a time will come” when psychologists and coaching teams will work together in harmony, in part due to the influence of players’ mental states on their performance.
He believes that, although some of Carvalhaes’ work may be considered “incipient by today’s standards”, there was also a “clairvoyance in him that can be found in the roots of today’s sports science”. And he adds: “the role played by psychology in elite football is enormous.”
“As Bill Beswick [ex-psicólogo da seleção nacional inglesa] He once said: ‘The mind is the athlete. The body is simply the medium’.”
*This text was originally published on April 4, 2022
