Emerson: Failed Brazilian Promise on Teesside

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Mike Brown of Bridlington Free Press profiles the final piece of Middlesbrough’s Brazilian trio of the 1990s…

Signing a Brazilian footballer is always exciting. When that signing is a Brazilian midfield powerhouse, added to a team already boasting a silky Brazilian schemer and a World Cup winning defender, things get more exciting still.

So it’s fair to say that Middlesbrough fans were fairly delirious when Emerson jetted into Teesside in 1996 to join compatriots Juninho and Branco.

The mid 90s were probably the best time to make a foreign signing. Football had undergone its gentrification in the early part of the decade, which reached its nadir post Euro 96, and gave football stadiums up and down the land a decidely more continental, or at least cosmopolitan, feel. There was enough European football on TV to whet our appetite, but not enough to saturate.

It was a time before a fanbase could call up any given player’s career statistics at the touch of a button, before one internet message board dweller reveals that he can speak fluent Portuguese then painstakingly translates every tweet said player has ever sent.

It was also long before the time when a career could be chewed up and spat out on the back of one heavily edited YouTube clip.

So while excitement was the prevailing feeling when Emerson Moisés Costa stepped out for his debut at the Riverside in Willie Maddren’s testimonial match against Inter Milan, most didn’t quite know what to expect. Continue reading