A farewell for Socrates

Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira, MD (19 February 1954 – 4 December 2011) was a Brazilian footballer. He was also a qualified doctor, and was the elder brother of Raí, who was a member of Brazil's World Cup winning squad in 1994.

He played for Botafogo-SP, before joining Corinthians in 1978. He spent six years with the club, scoring 172 goals in 297 league games. He then moved to Italy to play for Fiorentina, before retuning to Brazil to end his career with Flamengo and Santos. He is best remembered outside of his homeland for the sixty caps he won playing internationally for Brazil; he captained his country at the 1982 FIFA World Cup, and also appeared at the 1986 World Cup, the 1979 Copa América, and the 1983 Copa América – appearing in the defeat to Uruguay in the 1983 finals. He was named South American Footballer of the Year in 1983, and was named on Pelé's FIFA 100 list in 2004.

Sócrates was a technical playmaker, known for great through passes and his vision on the field, as well as his physical strength. He was also a two-footed player and a prolific goal scorer. His ability to read the game was highly valued, and his signature move was the blind heel pass.[2] He was considered to be one of the greatest midfielders ever to play the game.[3] Easily recognizable for his beard and headband, he became the "symbol of cool for a whole generation of football supporters".

Sócrates was capped 60 times for Brazil between May 1979 and June 1986, scoring 22 goals.[7] He played for, and captained, Brazil in the 1982 World Cup and also appeared in the 1986 World Cup.

During his time at Corinthians he co-founded the Corinthians Democracy movement, in opposition to the then-ruling military government. Sócrates and his team mates protested against the regime's treatment of footballers, and showed support to the wider movement for democratisation, by wearing shirts with 'Democracia' written on them during games. Sócrates has stated that his childhood heroes were Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and John Lennon.

Sócrates lived in Ribeirão Preto with his wife and six children. He was a columnist for a number of newspapers and magazines, writing not only about sports, but also politics and economics. He frequently appeared on Brazilian TV programmes as a football pundit. At the time of his death, Sócrates was writing a fiction book about the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

Pelé named him as one of the Top 125 Living Footballers in March 2004, and World Soccer named him one of 100 best footballers in history. In October 2008, Sócrates was inducted into the Pacembu Brazilian Football Museum Hall of Fame.

He was also noted for being an intellectual, a heavy drinker and smoker. Sócrates was admitted to intensive care in the Albert Einstein Hospital in São Paulo on 19 August 2011 with gastrointestinal bleeding secondary to portal hypertension and was put on life-support, suffering from septic shock. On 4 December 2011, it was announced that he had died.