Botafogo Relegation Inevitable After Year to Forget

There was a melancholy feel to the Monday morning air in Rio de Janeiro this week. As it so often is in this corner of the world, football was the decisive factor.

Fluminense, after briefly threatening to offer a genuine title challenge to Cruzeiro earlier in the campaign, failed to even qualify for the Copa Libertadores following a series of stuttering performances.

But, worst of all, for the second consecutive year, the city will not have a full contingent of representatives in the Campeonato Brasileiro Serie A. For no sooner have Vasco da Gama returned to the first division, than Botafogo have slipped through the trapdoor.

An attempt to claim no one had seen this coming would be a bare-faced lie. The writing had been on the wall for some time, as the club lurched from one crisis to the next, under the stewardship of a president who possessed about as much footballing guise as a giddy youth entering the mildly addictive world of Football Manager for the first time.

Mauricio Assumpcao's title of “Worst President in the history of Botafogo” is well earned. Having qualified for the Copa Libertadores last term, and having pushed Cruzeiro for the majority of the season, a spectacular collapse amidst quickfire player sales has ended with the inevitable.

Satiro Sodre/Associated Press

Assumpcao has now departed, with new president Carlos Eduardo Pereira left to clean up the mess.

Rewind 12 months and on the field the Glorioso had a team brimming with championship-winning potential. Jefferson, now Brazil's No. 1, was between the sticks.

The country's best young central defender, Doria, was playing regularly at the back and the midfield was bossed by four-time Champions League winner Clarence Seedorf.

But even before 2013 was out, the signs of what was to come were there. Coach Oswaldo de Oliveira, who had returned Botafogo to South America's premier club competition, the Copa Libertadores, for the first time in almost two decades, was not kept on due to his high salary.

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Since then, Seedorf left to coach Milan and Doria, alongside other potential match winners such as Rafael Marques, Vitinho and Hyuri have all been sold to battle the club's increasingly mounting debts.

It is simply impossible to maintain such a policy and expect the club to survive. The constant sale of any asset that could bring in a bundle of cash was offed to the highest bidder, whilst coach Vagner Mancini could only watch on in bewilderment.

What the manager has had to put up with is, to put it mildly, lamentable, and there must have been times this year when Mancini has been sorely tempted to just walk away from this mess and start afresh somewhere else.

He had been working for a president, after all, who gave serious consideration to abandoning the Campeonato Brasileiro less than halfway through the season, as reported by Globo Esporte (link in Portuguese). A man who, for several months at a time, neglected to even pay the players.

Four senior members of the playing staff, including central defender Bolivar and main goal threat Emerson Sheik, were sacked in October, whilst Mancini's attempt at resignation was denied, as reported by Globo Esporte (link in Portuguese).

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The tension at the club appears to have been paper thin for months and in recent days has boiled over. Days before their crunch tie with Santos last Sunday, Gege and Yuri Mamute were photographed exchanging blows in training, as reported by Lancenet (link in Portuguese).

Put bluntly, whatever could go wrong, promptly did. Even club captain and leader Jefferson became embroiled in a bitter war of words, with director of football Wilson Gottardo.

The goalkeeper missed the club's Copa do Brasil clash against Santos having been on international duty. However, Gottardo alleged that the 31-year-old was supposed to meet up with the squad and was branded a “coward” by Jefferson for spreading the story in the press, as reported by Globo Esporte (link in Portuguese).

Sunday's 2-0 defeat to Santos was the final nail in the coffin and the changes in personnel have been so vast they can only be described as destabilising.

Of their starting XI, only Jefferson and Gabriel played in the league's opening round, against Sao Paulo back in April. People may point to any particular moment in the season as the defining turn, but it is the club's former board of directors where the buck must stop.

Coming back from this, though, will be the real challenge.