As Lucas Moura received the ball in the middle of the Old Trafford pitch with his side already two goals to the good, there was little doubt about what he would do next. Driving at the heart of the defence, he left Chris Smalling on his backside before smashing the ball past David De Gea and into the Manchester United net. It was the cherry on the cake of a magnificent individual performance and it felt like Moura’s comeback – the individual redemption from forgotten man at Paris Saint Germain to Premier League star – was complete. Once the hottest property in Brazilian football, Lucas has turned things around in north London after a difficult time in France and is again one of the most talked-about players on both sides of the Atlantic. And although three goals in two games and the August Player of the Month award were not enough to propel him back into the Brazil squad, the Tottenham player would remain in the headlines throughout the international break.

Fear and Loathing in Sao Paulo

Without any action on the pitch, however, the reason for the column inches was altogether different. On 10th September, in an exchange of opinions on Twitter, Lucas Moura revealed his support for the highly-controversial Brazilian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. “Imagine someone honest in the middle of all those corrupt [politicians],” wrote the Tottenham forward, replying to a critic on the social media platform. “I, at least, don’t see the same old, same old in [Bolsonaro’s] proposals and speeches.” South America’s biggest country is deeply divided between those, like Moura, who see Bolsonaro as the solution to Brazil’s many ills and those who argue he is a threat to democracy. Now, even the beautiful game has been drawn into the debate. After three years of political tumult, Brazil goes to the ballot box for the first round of voting on 7th October and Bolsonaro, the ultra-right-wing candidate for the Social Liberal Party (PSL), is leading in the polls, six points ahead of his nearest challenger. The former army captain, who is currently in hospital recovering from a stab wound sustained on the campaign trail, has often been referred to as the “Donald Trump of the tropics”, but just a cursory glance at his record and proposals show him to be far more radical. The PSL candidate has repeatedly expressed his admiration for the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for 21 years from 1964. He has gone on record as saying he is “in favour of torture” and that “police officers who don’t kill are not [real] police officers”.