Robinho Woz Here

Wow, the things you can get for £32.5 million these days. When Man City paid that sum for Robinho last week they didn’t just get a bag full of Brazilian stepovers and a big name signing. They got a graffiti artist too.

Because after Brazil beat Chile 3-0 in Santiago on Sunday to go second in CONMEBOL World Cup qualifying, Robinho tagged the wall of the away dressing.

Here’s what he wrote: “There must be respect for the best team in the world”, in Spanish.

“I was the one who wrote it,” he said. “Chile should have respected Brazil for our tradition, which I don’t need to talk about. They thought it would be easy.”
“We didn’t ask for anything more than respect.”
“Maybe if they had played more defensively, they would have made it more difficult for us. But they tried to play us on equal terms and you saw the result.”

Is it just me or is this pretty stupid? First of all some poor guy is going to have to clean up after Robinho now. And I thought either Italy or Spain were the best teams in the world right now, if you take either holding the World Cup or being no.1 in the FIFA rankings as your measure.

More importantly, don’t teams like Brazil want teams prefer it when teams like Chile to play them as equals? Imagine if Chile came out and put 10 men behind the ball? Then Robinho would have something to complain about.

I haven’t been able to find an image of said graffiti yet, so if anyone sees it please let us know. I like to imagine it in big yellow spray-paint, underlined in green. But it was probably just marker pen.

update: Big tip of the hat to Dylan of Corinthians Offside, who tracked down the image. Here is the 2008 Robinho in question, from his early Man City period: