Bruno Ribeiro, currently graduating in Social Psychology, joins us for part 23 of the series. Bruno is a football fanatic, with FC Porto being the team he supports. The interest he has in the sport drove him to start his own blog, Lugar Cativo, about three years ago; nowadays he is also part of the cast of Terceiro Anel, one of the most successful Portuguese football blogs.

I thank Bruno for agreeing to the interview.

Tell us a bit about the Portuguese football history and the football culture which exists.

First of all: we breed football! The sport dominates society; which is pretty much pathetic some times!

Now, about our history. Football have always been Portugal main sport since the beginning of the 20th century; it’s impact in Portuguese’s life was/is so great that Salazar’s dictatorship took advantage of it to ‘distract’ the mob of the country problems.

Portugal always had great players, but some difficulties to build good squads. It’s a bit of strange that we’re only to our fourth World Cup, one everyone recognize our quality! I believe that our problem was a um of bad management of the Football Federation and a perpetual feeling of inferiority, which prevent us of showing our true quality along the years.

We’ve never achieved anything more then two Under’20 World Cups, back in ‘89 and ‘91. The closest we were of actually win some silverware was Euro’04, where we loss at home with Greece; European Cup tends to show the best of us. At the World Cup level, only in ‘66 we did something to be proud of, finishing 3rd at expenses of the USSR in a year where Eusebio marvelled the world.

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